HC vs EA interface

[Drake0508]

Hey guys,

 

I was kicking around the idea of throwing a controller behind my dayghter’s tv in her room. She is a fan of the OSD and I’d like to be able to control her tv turning off also. I see what the EA series looks like on screen. My programmer told me to just use an HC-250. Is the GUI different? Other than power, will she be missing anything?

 

thanks!

[South Africa C4 user]

To answer your actual question, she won’t be missing much.  The HC controllers use the old Flash system for the OSD while the EA series use Android as the underlying OS. This has numerous advantages but not significant when it comes to a TV OSD. More noticeable when moving from a V2 to T3 touchscreen. If she likes the circle interface then this is what the HC controllers give,  if I remember correctly, the EA has a grid or linear option too.

In my house, I currently have an EA5, two HC800 slaves (one provides the OSD for our theatre), an HC250 behind every TV (3) and three EA1s used for Aircon integration elsewhere.  I could probably (have never checked what connections are used) swap all of the EA1s and HC250s around but have t seem the need for the hassle. So what I am saying is that an HC250 works perfectly as an OSD for a TV.

Slightly off topic, from one of your earlier posts, I seem to recall you have a CA controller as main controller.  AFAIK, you cannot add an HC250 or anything else under a CA1. Given that you seem to want to add quite a bit to your system (and this desire will only grow over time), I’d strongly recommend doing it properly and getting an EA5 (or an EA3 if on a budget) as your director and building on this.