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I have been looking for Television Nirvana, and it's not the 16x9 Widescreen Sony 57" set in my basement either. It's a remote. Most men have the same problem. One TV with 5 different remotes. There is your TV remote, Satellite remote, VCR remote, DVD remote, AV Receiver remote and possibly a few more lying around here and there. Of course, some men may not see this as a problem, more of a power thing. With 5 remotes, we feel like king but at the same time, we are the only members of our household capable of knowing which remote controls which device and what needs to be turned on at any given time in order to produce the magic picture on the screen in glorious 5.1 surround sound.

At some point though, this "power" became frustrating to even me. I also have this thing about clutter and 5 remotes on the coffee table just looks plain ugly. My search for the perfect universal remote began. In the past, I had tried to get the remote monster under control to no avail. I happen to have a "goofball" DVD player which is not a huge name brand. What that means is that it's not programmed into any universal remotes I could find and as a result, while I could combine most of my devices, I always had to use the original DVD remote (which by the way, was the worst engineered piece of crap known to man). Hell, even when I had a name brand player by Philips, for some reason, it never worked with a universal remote either. This was very frustrating.

I then heard of "Learning" Universal Remotes which could learn codes directly from one remote to another. You point them at each other, press a few buttons and the codes transfer. Cool idea, but poor execution as most of the learning remotes were badly designed and still, confusing to use. My guide is that if my wife (a very smart woman) doesn't get it after I explain it to her once, it's not user friendly. These less sophisticated remotes ran in the $50-60 range. Specifically, I got the RCA RCU810. I tried to use it... I really did. But it just wasn't what I was looking for. That was a year ago.

About the same time, I saw a review of a Sony all in one Universal Remote. It looked promising but after reading a few reviews, I decided that the cost of $200 and the lack of certain features wouldn't make it my dream remote. I settled and bought the RCA.

Now, flash forward a year later and with my new TV, I was again growing weary of the remote clutter, so I went in search of the Sony Remote again hoping they had updated it. Well, they indeed had, and a full review is on Remote Central. It mentioned how much it had improved but it was still at a list of around $199. Wowzers. That's a lot of samolian. A quick search of the net found that retail was quite a bit less than list... more along the lines of $110-120. So... I ordered.

The box sat for a week in my basement due to the painting fiasco before I got around to checking it out first hand. The suspense was killing me. More on my experience later...