After ushering my parents into the digital television age I was planning to buy my Dad a universal remote control for Father's Day, but I think it would make his life more complicated rather than less.

My parents recently bought a big Sony Bravia LCD and a Panasonic DMR-EX75 hard drive recorder, which they're very happy with, but once you throw in pay TV they're left with a mess remote controls and AV inputs. I thought a good universal remote would be the answer to all their problems.

I've been using universal remotes for years but I got sick of buying cheap and nasty ones, with buttons that would break after six months, so two years ago I splashed out on a fantastic Sunwave SRC-3000 backlit touch screen remote.

The Sunwave doesn't have any buttons, just a touch screen display with a grid of 28 virtual buttons. The remote changes the layout of the buttons on the touch screen depending on what you're controlling. One best things about it is that it's a learning remote, which means I can point my old remote controls at it and the Sunwave remote can learn their codes.

The other cool thing about the Sunwave is you can program macros into it, which means with one button press you can get it to execute a string of commands such as turn on the TV, turn it to the AV channel, turn on the DVD player and then turn on the surround sound.

I've fallen in love with my Sunwave. Still, now that I've started using a Vista media centre computer as my primary entertainment device, the SRC-3000's limitations are becoming apparent. I've come to the conclusion that when you're navigating through lots of menus, such as on a PVR, a four-way rocker with a button in the middle is more user-friendly than pure touch screen.

To test the waters, I got two Logitech Harmony universal remotes on loan - the 525 and the 785 - both of which have a very good reputation. I was thinking about the Harmony 525 for Dad and the Harmony 785 for me. Just in case my good friends at Logitech are reading - it's not a scam, I do intend to review them and give them back ;-)

Anyway, the 785 is working well with my media centre and old CRT television, but it wasn't so easy setting up the 525 for Dad. The problem is Dad's fancy TV and hard drive recorder are just too complicated. Universal remotes are fantastic if you want to control standard equipment such as TVs, VCRs and DVD players, because they're all pretty much the same - play, stop, channel and up down and so forth. There's no such standardisation when it comes to the advanced functions on a PVR and new televisions, and their remote controls have more buttons than the dashboard of the space shuttle.

The remote control with the Panasonic hard drive recorder is the biggest problem, take a look at it. It's got buttons such as "Direct Navigator", "Sub Menu" and "Drive Select". Sure you can map them to buttons on a universal remote, but you then need to remember which button is which. I might be prepared to do that, but my parents shouldn't have to. Writing macros to switch between activities such as watching free to air TV and watching pay TV also becomes very complicated when you have to allow for the fact that the hard drive recorder might be in DVD or SD card mode at the time. The Harmony remotes are so advanced that eventually I would have cobbled something together but, in this case, the best remote for the job is the one that came with the device. This is going to become a growing problem for universal remote makers as a plethora of non-standardised digital recorders hit the market.

In the end it was just becoming too complicated and after several hours of messing around I realised, in a moment of clarity, that I was trying to force a solution on my Dad rather than meet his needs. He doesn't need yet another gadget to further complicate his life. I got him this Father's Day card instead (Dad, if you're reading this before Sunday, look away now);

Happy Father's Day, Dad. Welcome to the digital lounge room.