I have the 8090 and I am about 95% happy with it. I bought it before I even had a home theater if you can believe that! Basically the reasons that I got it is that I got DirecTV and wanted to be able to change the channels from my two televisions upstairs and didn't want to buy another receiver yet (no kids and one wife that doesn't watch all that much TV).

Anyway, I found that the IR-repeated worked very well - the range is good - I only have problems from the bedroom if the remote is over the bed - I guess just too much inbetween the remote and the receiver/repeater. But, in general I can still control it from just about anywhere in the house.

Another thing that I did was get some X10 wall switches and lamp modules along with an IR-to-X10 converter. Now I can use the remote to control almost all my lights downstairs - great for dimming down the house lights when starting a movie (always impresses friends, even though it doesn't cost very much and isn't that big of a deal) - now that I really do have an official home theater! Also, I can turn the downstairs lights of from upstairs with the remote - pretty handy.

I have been able to control almost everything - this is where that 5% comes in... The only thing that I can't do is (1) bring up the "menu" on my Toshiba DVD - you know, where you can select options, etc. Also, I get to the setup menu, but cannot select anything - I need to do this because when I want to watch a DVD upstairs I have to change the audio out from AC-3 to PCM so that I can get audio (I have the DSS and DVD, etc. on a modulator to the rest of the house).

Anyway, I may have to come back and revise my post in a few days because I just the other day filled out a form on One-for-All's website for the "advanced codes". Hopefully these will allow me to perform the functions that I want. If I changed anything about the 8090 it would be to add learning - that would pretty much cover everything. The other thing that bothers me is that you cannot change "shifted" keys like you can regular keys. For instance, the Previous Channel key is the Display key when shifted. You can remap the Previous Channel key so that when you are in TV mode, for instance, it will really be the DSS Previous Channel function, but you cannot remap the shifted key - it will remain the TV mode Display function - not way around it.

Anyway, not a big deal because of the Theather mode where you select your main components - that puts almost everything you need to do in one mode... But it is still a minor annoyance.

For the money (about $80 at http://www.smarthome.com/ as well as at Circuit City or Best Buy) I think that it is probably the best remote you can get. If you move up into the $200 to $300 range you get a lot more to choose from.

Later,
Brad