i have a Sony KE-37xs910 plasma and a Philips 26PF8946. i am having a tough time understanding why the RC9800i support for widescreen TV seems to be very limited.

my Sony remote is RM-Y1001 which has several frequently used buttons: picture (vivid, normal, professional), wide (controls aspect ratios), pic off (turn off plasma screen while the tv is still on if you want to listen to music through the tv's speaker). when i went through the set up steps, the discreet code was found very quickly; however, these buttons are missing and have to be taught to one of the 8 immutable user defined functions. i tried using a few other manual IR code sets, but it seems that the buttons are fixed for a particular type/make of a device and are turn on and off depending on the code set.

for a relatively recently released remote, this is an extremely strange decision not to have buttons for commonly used HDTV functions. am i missing something?

the more traumatic experience is with my Philips 26PF8946. the set up again was quick to recognized the code set; however, this TV requires to be switched to HD mode to watch HD channels. you guessed it, there's no HD input selection. i misplaced the orginal remote so now i can't even teach that function to one of the user defined function buttons. what's going on Philips?

please comment or give suggestions if you had better luck with HDTV controls. thanks. - alan