AMX vs Elan

patb

This is somewhat like my earlier question about AMX vs Vantage, but now I'm faced with a DIFFERENT situation of needing to talk intelligently about the shortcomings of Elan. In this case because of a mutual friend I have an audience with a well established residential dealer that sells Elan and evidently is pretty happy with them. I'll skip the background and come straight to the point. I am going to need to present the pros of using AMX over Elan when I know nothing other than a general overview of the Elan product line.

I look at it like the owner of a Honda Civic that is happy with driving the Civic, yet has never seen a Mercedes, Lexus, Ferrari, etc. He might be happy with the Civic (Elan) because he doesn't know what else is out there. The Civic might do everything and go everywhere he needs to go, but he doesn't realize what is missed because of a lack of any other kind of driving experience. I used this analogy to set up the initial meeting, and the residential integrator asked me point blank - so what is it about AMX that will make me want to use them instead of Elan, everything I want to do I am able to do with Elan.

My angle is not to sell him AMX equipment - I'm not even an AMX dealer. My angle is to make him fall in love with AMX so much that he starts to use it and therefore uses me as the AMX programmer, thus increasing my client base and business.

I know a few things that are basic -
1) has a limited selection of touch panels compared to AMX,
2) Elan is not an open ended programming environment, from what I understand there are "drivers" for various types of equipment that are "dragged" into the programming environment so the device to be programmed
3) While Elan has media servers and DVD managers on its own, it is not open ended enough to support any number of other media servers (kalaidescape, escient, etc). Am I right in this assumption?
4) AMX has web-based control over all of its G4 panels, I don't think Elan has web-control, but I'm not really sure.

If anyone has worked with Elan, can you give me some highlights of what I should mention to this dealer?

Thanks,

Patrick

iainshaw

I think one of the most telling differences between Elan and AMX from a user interface is the quality of the image you get on the TP. Low resolution, blurry, smeary - if it were an AMX panel you'd send it back as faulty.

Now I know we have the 430/435 models but they can be made to look pretty good. I've never seen an Elan panel look anything other than awful

Spire_Jeff

I am not familiar with the latest offerings from Elan, but in the past, my biggest complaint was having to go to every touch panel to load it. This involved pulling off the metal trim ring each time and running the risk of having paint pull off the wall or damage occurring to the wall finish.

I believe that Elan is now integrating with a homelogic brick. This means they can do more than in the past, but I don't know how much their touch panels have evolved since I last used them.

The biggest obstacle I can see for you is the fact that the Elan product is doing everything they need. Sure, AMX can do more, but doing more requires more programming and more cost. From a dealer perspective, this can be a scary proposition. If you have something available that allows quick deployment of projects, I would highlight that. Also, highlight the ability to make custom graphics and highlight the quality of the graphics. The AMX Touch panels are capable of better graphics than anything I've seen on an Elan panel.

Lastly, be prepared for them to not see the light. There is a company that we work with that deals with Elan. They have the same stance and nothing we can show them seems to change their mind. It's not even a price issue as they sell VERY high end speakers (50k /pair and higher) to most of their clients.

Jeff