|
...Continued from Page 7.
Macro recording is particularly easy, involving no more than navigating the remote and picking the commands you’d like. During recording it’s possible to insert a delay of 1 through 10 seconds between any commands. Macros play back at a leisurely pace, with a 10 command macro taking about 10 seconds to complete, displaying the exact transmitted function as it goes along. Macros can be viewed from the setup menu after being recorded, but cannot be modified except by re-recording.
With a full clock and calendar including day-of-week and year, I would have expected the SRC-3810 to come with timer capabilities – alas, it does not. Also, the “sleep timer” described in the manual does not seem to actually exist on the remote.
That [Macro] button at the top? It’s used merely to display the soft keys on the current screen that contain a macro. If a screen has no macros it will appear blank when the button is held. Useful? You be the judge...
Micro management.
Some remote controls are capable of capturing what are known as “micro macros”. These are brief sequences of commands that, instead of being a recorded sequence referencing other buttons like a regular macro, are taught all at once from other remotes using the learning process. Short three, four or even five step macros can sometimes be recorded this way. Micro macros can be difficult to capture, since learning remotes can only store so much information at a single time and require zero blank time between commands.
Although the SRC-3810 already has plenty of real macros, I was interested to find out whether it could also make use of this unofficial trick. Success! During testing I was able to learn four and even five step micros with ease. So where exactly could these be used on a remote otherwise brimming with real macros? Why, on those device selection buttons that are only able to hold a learned command – automatic input and power switching macros just might be possible after all!
Channel groupies.
At this point you might be thinking that those hard buttons above the screen have no real purpose – not quite! The ones marked [News], [Movie] and [Kids] are used as banks of “channel classification groups”, basically short favorite channel macros. For any device it’s possible to record a four-step macro using the numeric keypad and then assign it to one of these groups. Then, whenever you press one of those classification buttons while under that device, the [Channel Up/Down] keys will switch to rotating through your favorite channels.
Up to 50 of these macros can be saved across the three groups. Each macro is assigned to a specific device, so if you have 5 saved for the “news” group under the [TV] device and a further 10 under the [Sat] device, only those favorite channels intended for a particular device will be seen. While browsing channel groups the LCD will indicate the device, group and current channel number. As with devices the groups can be renamed with an 8-character label, but channel macros can only be named with their raw channel number. To exit favorite channel mode, just press the classification button a second time.
Somehow those four hard buttons at the top of the remote still feel underused. The favorite channel function is certainly better than their one-time setup purpose on the SRC-8000, but system macro buttons might have been more universally functional.
| 
Previous page
