Keen on either of the above, however my Pace Twin (two tuner digi box and hard disk recorder) makes extensive use of its red, green, blue and yellow buttons from the original remote....and in the excellent reviews I don't see labels with these words being available anywhere on the remotes?

If you're not familiar with the twin it shows commands on-screen when within menus or the recording library etc with instructions such as 'press *' where * is a picture of the red, green, etc button.... and also uses said buttons for digi tv features etc so you can see the need to to be able to have a label on the lcd screen to correspond.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks

On the 3100, there are 4 rectangular keys at the bottom of the screen. By pressing the component name, you can shift to the 2nd and 3d row, giving a total of 12 keys. These can be labelled with up to 8 characters.

The 2500 does not have this feature.

Thanks Ron, see what you mean in the review now. Just got to decide between a 3100 and an MX500 then..

Those color-labelled keys are usually inclusions on Sony's "T" versions, such as RM-AV3100T, designed for sale in Europe where TeleText is available.

Thanks Daniel, so do the T versions have physical coloured buttons or just the appropriate labels avaialble to use in the positions Ron mentions?
Just wondering if you had experienced the difference between the two versions as I'm thinking about buying one from the US?
Same seems to apply to the MX500 as this seller here (Germany) has an MX500 with coloured buttons:

[Link: cgi.ebay.co.uk]

At least I've narrowed down my choice to a 3100, MX500 or Marantz 3200/Pronto Neo....Shame there's no review on the last one, would haev loved to read your expert and detailed opinion!

Being that it's a LCD display, there's no color. :-)

On the RM-AV2500T (which I don't think is out yet) there will be set labels for the colors. For the RM-AV3100T, the colors are just on the editable LCD keys (although there is a fixed "Teletext" label not on the US version).