I have four mx-850 remotes in my home and every person I have done installs for has this remote.These remotes are not cheap.The remote alone is $329.00 new. Then your base station is $199.00.
I love these remotes, but no longer! Today I called the company because one of my remotes has the fast forward and play button not working when you push it. When you push any button you should see the icon in the upper right of the display pop up.When I explained what was happening to the tech. dept. they tell me I need to get a new remote at a special returned price of $279.00. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!! they don't even fix them!! I will never buy another remote from this company again.The company used to charge $125.00 for a remote exchange last year. That was a fair price. I'm sure any repair might cost that much.

This is now a throw away remote.

Vid53

Very annoying, I assume you have tried the obvious,:

New batteries
Load another minimal config and test problem buttons ?
Leave with out batteries over night,
Download config to pc, leave with out batteries over night, upload config ?

To add balance, I have several of the same remote, bought on ebay for £20 to £30 second hand, and all are 100% OK after 5 years heavy use.

Best of luck

I have done everything and yes it is a shame, that a company would not stand behind their product better.When you call them the only people you can talk to, are the techs. which i really wonder about to. No wonder Logitech seems to be a growing favorite out there.
The company I work for, makes every effort to take care and keep their customers.

I believe they stand behind their product for a year. After that what do you expect?

I expect them to be able to fix a product they sell!You buy a car and they stand behind it for a period of time and then it can still be repaired. $329 is a lot of money to buy a throw away item! Last year they charged $125 to exchange the MX-850.

You must hate every TV manufacturer. If you bought a $299 AVR you'd actually take it in to see if it could be fixed after warranty?

+1 you can add a whole bunch of products to that list in our industry. Unfortunately it has gotten to the point were a lot of equipment has to be thrown away and replaced.

It usually cost $100 just to get someone to look at repairing something anymore. It just doesn't make financial sense for a lot of companies to repair out of warranty products anymore.

We have customers call and stop in all the time asking about getting equipment repaired. And most of the time we never even sold it to them. Customers are constantly shocked at the estimates we give them. And we only mark up the cost just to cover our time and the shipping costs. It has gotten to the point where we won't even get involved with a repair that was purchased from another dealer because somehow it is our fault and they think we are trying to profit from the repair.

Plus most remotes get more wear and tear on them then most of the other products in our industry. A good remote should last between 4-7 years. You don't buy an iPhone an expect it to last that long do you? You buy a newer one because the old one is usually beat up and you want the latest and greatest features. Will Apple fix it? No they offer a repalcement for less money just like URC does. The mx850 "was" a great remote when it was released, but URC's latest remotes are much better solutions.

+1

The keypads wear out. You can open the remote and try to clean any obvious debris, but as far as I know there's no lasting fix for revitalizing a contact once it starts to wear. I wish URC would just sell us some blank keypads, and we could keep these things running. Even $125 is too much money IMO for a problem that could be so easily DIY fixed.

If the problem is the contacts wearing out, you can try the old trick of using a rear window defogger repair kit. However, this repair doesn't last forever.

What trick is that?

I didn't try that, I tried a conductive ink product meant for repairing keyboards, and every time in a matter of days the ink would start to lose contact with the rubber.

Maybe there's some way to prep the surface so it will adhere longer, but I figured I'd stop while I was ahead before I ended up shorting out something in the remote.

In the interest of being thorough, have you check the programming to see if those buttons have codes on them? You should be able to push the button harder to make contact - it generally will.

Alternately, have you tried to re-download the program to the remote?



Damon

If the key in only one device doesn't work, but works fine in other devices, than it could be programming. But if the doesn't work in any device, than its the conductivity.

NOT.

The cost of replacement used to be much lower than the $279 cited in the first post, and it occurred to me that nobody here has questioned that detail. 

I just called URC and was told that I, as a dealer, can get a new MX850 as a replacement for much less than was originally claimed.  The warranty on this replacement unit is one year.