While building a home theater stocked with a variety of electronic components is lots of fun, unfortunately, going the do-it-yourself route often ends with, well, not quite the proverbial Tower of Babel but perhaps worse from your significant other’s point of view – the dreaded Coffee Table of Babel. Those remote controls for the TV, A/V receiver, DVD or Blu-Ray player, cable or satellite set-top box, and other electronic equipment all begin to pile up, making for an ugly mess, and making the home theater appear more complex to operate than it otherwise is.
Back in 2004, Logitech acquired Easy Zapper, a Canadian startup specializing in universal remote controls, giving a firm best known for computer accessories such as replacement keyboards and mice a foothold in the home theater industry.
Under their Harmony division’s moniker, Logitech now produces a full range of remotes in a variety of retail price-points from $29 to $349. While their most advanced remote is arguably the tablet-shaped Harmony 1100, after reading a variety of reviews, I decided to avoid the tablet shape and go with the model directly below it, Logitech’s Harmony 900, which as of the time of this review, sells for $240.99 at Amazon.com.
This is a remote geared towards someone who knows his way around both his home theater and to some extent his PC as well, and who’s prepared to tinker a bit to set up the remote. In other words, expect a bit of set-up time, but once complete, it does make for a rather powerful remote.
Programming the Remote
After installing the supplied software on your PC, the first step is to gather all of your existing remotes, and to write down the brand and model numbers of all of your home theater components. Logitech maintains a database of approximately 5,000 brands and 225,000 devices, which the Harmony 900’s PC interface will search in order to set-up your remote. If you have a component that’s not on there, don’t fret – as long as you have its remote, you should be able to manually program its codes into the Harmony 900 while it’s plugged into your computer via its supplied USB cable.
It’s also possible to tweak the remote to add functions not included in the database. For example, since I do just about all of my TV watching with my A/V receiver on for surround sound, I ended up programming the A/V receiver’s volume and mute controls into the various devices controlled by the remote. Depending upon the amount of equipment you own, and the level of control you’re aiming for, early on you may have to do a fair amount of tweaking to customize the remote to your preferences.
While the Harmony 900 allows control over individual components, its first emphasis is on what it calls (on the remote’s GUI) “Activities.” These typically include watching TV, watching a movie, playing a CD, etc. The Harmony 900 will group together tasks so that pressing one button on the remote will automatically do things such as:
- Turn on your A/V receiver.
- Switch it to the TV input.
- Turn on your TV.
- Make sure it’s switched whichever input the satellite TV is on.
- Turn on the satellite TV digital set-top box.
And so on. A similar activity can be programmed watching a movie, which switch everything on to watch a DVD. For those with a few pieces of home theater gear that need to work together in harmony (if you’ll pardon the pun), this is a pretty convenient way to begin a few hours of television watching.
The Harmony 900 also supports individual components of course, which it calls “Devices.” The remote’s GUI can be toggled back and forth between devices and activities.
It is a great remote, but one big and one little caveat: the big one is it’s got a limited lifespan. Expect ot replace it every year or so. Kind of hard to justify at that price. I’ve switched to a cheaper, sturdier, not as slick remote.
The little caveat is that the RF is a bit slow. Often a 2-3 second delay before the units being controlled out of line-of-sight responded.
I wish it didn’t have those problems. It’s got a lot of promise, but I can’t afford to keep plunking down that much cash for replacements.
Not sure I agree about the lifespan of this remote. I’ve had one for almost 4 years now, and it still works great.
Glad to hear it. I bought one, had it fail after a year and a half. Bought a replacment because I liked it so much, and the second one failed a year later.
Maybe I just got two lemons in a row, but I couldn’t afford to see if the 3rd time was a charm.
While I don’t have this remote, I am a fan of Harmony remotes in general. When I needed to upgrade remote I bought very early on, (probably early 2005), it was so awesomely easy I couldn’t believe it. Hardest part was finding password for my online Harmony account. I’ve recommended these remotes to friends and family, and one very tech savvy co-worker who is hard to impress who loves his.
got some harmonys, 550,880,and 1000, probably won’t buy another.
when their servers have issues (since they have for last 2 months) you CAN’T update the remote.
the computer software is just to access the online (cloud) database in a gui instead of using the myharmony website.
they need to allow local storage of the codes before I buy another,
I have a Harmony 300 and it will NOT permit programming, direct access, or custom learning of decimal or dash channel numbers (or the dash button) for my Samsung TV – invalid command. Only integers permitted for this device. Other devices work fine. TV is 5 years old. I’m glad my investment was small – no more Harmony for me.
I have owned a Logitech 670 for several years (won it in a Christmas drawing), and I have never had any problems with it. It works great with DirecTV and my Vizio TV. I’ve only updated it a couple of times from the website, but that has always gone smoothly too. I took the batteries out of the remotes for the individual devices and stored them all in freezer bags because they aren’t necessary any more.
trust me this remote is the shizzle. you always trust your crazy uncle right