Technology for the living room What are good Universal remotes
Technology for the living room What are good Universal remotes

Who throws after a hard day on the Sofa, the angry often about the Chaos on the coffee table: a remote control for the TV, one for Receiver, one for the speakers. Or wait, wasn’t that for the DVD Player? Who wants to stop the loss of control, is rapidly controls on universal remote. They differ externally hardly any different from normal remotes, and send their signals via infrared waves. Your advantage: The user switches easily between devices with a single press of a button.

The offer is large. We take five models between 6 euros and 40 euros in the crosshairs. The cheapest model is the “4-in-1″variant of Heitech for 5,99 Euro. The Online retailer Pearl sends his “8 in 1″remote control for 8,85 euros including shipping costs into the race. Medion competes with his “Life E74013” from the Online-Shop for 24.90 euros including shipping costs. Also at the Start: the “Smart Control 5” One for all, as well as the “Harmony 350 Control” of Logitech, both for 39,99 Euro in the consumer electronics market.

As the game field is a common living room with four infrared-enabled devices. It is important to conduct a television, a cable Receiver, a DVD Player and a compact Hi-Fi system from a single source in a comprehensive way. All test devices should come with this living room scenario clearly.

you must be disappointed A bit of programming

Who wants to immediately losbedienen relaxed. The remote controls must first be given to the functions of the devices programmed. Each manufacturer works with specific Codes for all the possible types of televisions, receivers or music systems. If the pre-installed Codes are not working, commands can be manually transferred via the learning function of the old remote control – the promise.

Heitech drives a but here already to despair. The manufacturer saves with big words, and in the “large built-in code database” is really code for “almost all the brands” – but also almost only for TV devices. According to the cheap test model dominated the domestic Flicker after entering, immediately, for the other three devices, the necessary Code is missing.

this case provides Heitech – as most of the manufacturers – a search function. The remote control is trying to make the series after all of the provided Codes for a specific type of device, until the target object responds to. This can take half an hour or longer. And that sucks, because you have to wait all the while attentive to the Moment in which it is so far. If he comes at all.