Rob Brooks-Bilson

I have a really sweet Logitech Harmony 880 remote control that I use to control all of my home theater components (HDTV, HD Cable Box, SD Cable Box, Series 2 Tivo, XBox, Denon Receiver, Sony DVD Player). The Harmony replaces all of my individual remotes and provides "activity" based control over my equipment. This makes it dead easy to do things like watch Tivo, listen to Internet radio, watch DVD's, etc, without having to know anything about how each piece of equipment works, what order it may need to be turned on in, or specific remote control functions.

Last week, unfortunately, my Harmony stopped working. I was fairly sure that the IR transmitter was shot, but I wasn't 100% sure. It wasn't until I spoke to Logitech tech support that I was reminded of a little trick for diagnosing a dead IR remote. You see, if you point a digital camera at an IR remote control, you can see the IR transmitter(s) light up via the LCD screen on the digital camera. The picture above illustrates what a typical functioning remote control's IR transmitter looks like. In the case of my Harmony, the IR transmitter was completely dead. Logitech's sending me a new remote which should be here in a few days.

One other really cool feature with the Harmony 880 is that you program it over the Internet. So, when my new remote arrives, all I need to do to set it up is to log into the Logitech web site, connect my remote via USB, and click the Update Remote button. 1 minute later, my new remote will have all of the programming of my old remote. Now that's slick!

I finally pulled the trigger and replaced my 12 year old CRT based television with a brand spankin' new Samsung HD-S5687-W 56" 1080p DLP TV. One of the things I really like about the Samsung DLP TV's is how tweakable they are beyond the standard user settings.

Samsung TV's have what's known as a service menu, a special menu that's used by service technicians and calibrators to test and tweak various aspects of the TV beyond what's available in the user menus.

To access the service menu on the HLS models, make sure your TV is turned off then enter the following sequence on your remote:

You'll now be in the service menu where you can view stats such as how many hours you've watched on your current lamp, view various test patterns (more on this in a later post), and tweak all sorts of settings for the TV.

Two words of caution for using the service menu:

1. Upon entering the service menu, and user defined settings you may have made in the user menus will be lost. It's a good idea to write them down before entering the service menu as you'll need to reenter them after you exit
2. DO NOT MESS WITH SETTINGS IN THE SERVICE MENU UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE FOR. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR TV RESULTING FROM ANYTHING YOU READ HERE, OR THAT YOU DO ON YOUR OWN!