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| The Sharp Aquos LC-46D64U's remote is poorly designed, difficult to use and will probably break on you fairly quickly. Go find another remote to use with this TV. |
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 Ergonomics & Durability (4.15)
The Sharp Aquos LC-46D64U's remote is not good... very not good. Let's start with the way the remote is organized. The bottom of the remote is weighted with most of the most important controls found towards the bottom. the overall effect is that at neutral you get decent balance, but the extreme length of the remote throws this off a bit. If you shift your hand up to access the rest of the remote's buttons all semblance of balance goes out the window quickly. This is exacerbated by the fact that for some reason there's a ton of empty space in some of the prime real estate on the remote around the volume and channel buttons. This extra empty space make the remote even larger and more ungainly than it needs to be.
There is some decent contouring when you hold the remote at neutral, but the whole thing is made from rather slick plastic and shifting your hand up the remote, as you will need to do to access the number pad or power button, means you lose any nice contouring, in fact the remote gets wider and more difficult to hold the further up you hold it. The result is that you'll probably be dropping this thing left and right.
Durability is another area of concern, not only are we worried about the durability of the plastic and the battery cover is a slide-off job that will inevitably break, but on top of that Sharp, in their wisdom, decided to included a ridiculous hinged compartment at the bottom of the remote to protect a whole five buttons. You can guess how long it will take your kid to play around with the cool close/open feature before it just snaps off.
To round the sucktitude out the buttons on the Sharp Aquos LC-46D64U's remote feel cheap and don't give you a lot of key travel or tactile feedback. This is close to the worst remote we've ever seen for a TV. On the plus side the backlight is pleasant.
Button Layout & Use (4.35)
The Sharp Aquos LC-46D64U's buttons are not very well laid out. At neutral the D-Pad is within easy reach, but those with smaller hands will find the channel and volume controls take a bit of a stretch to reach. More annoying is the fact that there's a ton of wasted space on the remote, especially around these most used controls. We would have much preferred to see buttons closer together and easier to reach. This poor use of space has its biggest impact on buttons found further from the neutral point, in particular the number pad, power button and playback controls are all found near the upper end of the remote with a major shift of your hand necessary to reach any of them. On top of that poor design is the fact that for some reason Sharp decided to hide five buttons away in a compartment found at the bottom of the remote, there was no reason why these buttons needed to be hidden away given the large amount of wasted space on the remote and it just creates concerns about durability, as we mentioned above.
Programming & Flexibility (5.5)
The Sharp Aquos LC-46D64U's remote can be used as a universal remote to control other parts of your home theater system, which is a plus. Of course on the negative side the remote is so poorly designed that we don't know why anyone would want to use it as their universal remote.
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