Sony Corp. announced 15 new models of its LCD television "BRAVIA" Aug. 29, 2007. Eleven of them will go on sale Sept. 20, and the other four will be released in November.
Of those 15 models, 13 are accompanied by an RF remote control that transmits signals by non-directional radio waves instead of infrared rays, which were adopted for the remote controls of the former BRAVIA models. Also, those 13 models are equipped with a device that receives transmissions from the RF remote control.
RF remote controls are adopted for more game and karaoke consoles than before, but Sony will be the first to employ RF remote controls, in earnest, for TV sets in Japan.
Sony's RF remote control was named "Oki Raku Rimo Con" because "it can be easily used even if it is placed on the floor," said Takashi Fukuda, the president of the TV Business Group and SVP and corporate executive of Sony.
In other words, the RF remote control was named as such after the greatest merit of RF remote controls: Their users do not have to worry about the location of the TV set or the position of the remote control when they use it.
For about 30 years, most of the remote controls for TV sets have been the ones that use infrared rays to transmit signals. However, an increasing number of infrared remote controls are becoming difficult to use for recent TV sets.
Some of the reasons are as follows: (1) The infrared receivers of TV sets are becoming relatively smaller as the size of TV screens is becoming larger; (2) TV sets are now more likely to malfunction because of the increasing number of illumination lamps with an inverter; (3) more TV sets are now positioned in a way that the infrared receivers are covered.
The radio transmission system used as the interface of the remote control is the "IEEE802.15.4," which is adopted in the ZigBee standard. The radio frequency of the RF remote control is the 2.4GHz spectrum. And its reach is 7 m, same as that of the infrared remote control, according to Sony. An infrared remote control will also be included in the product.
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