How long did it take you to become familiar with all those menu screens and get them set up right?
Man are there a lot of screens...whoa!
Thanks again for this great review.
You're welcome.
The multi-channel recorders have more functions to get familiar with, for sure. There are over 100 separate sub-menu's on a SD744. I'm sure the menu's on the 633 and 688 are even more involved that the 744.
Anyway, I approached the the initial setup of the F8 just like any other recorder with a well constructed menu. You don't really learn the menu per se at the start as much as use the menu structure to guide you through what you need to do. The 'portal' for all of the functions is the main menu headings and the sub-functions are pretty logical extensions of the main menu headings. It's not all that confusing really, but when you're working through the sub-menu's if there's a function you're not familiar with, reference the manual (or my review) to help explain.
So, I start with the first item in the main menu and page through the sub-menu's and quickly make a determination if there's a setting that needed to make on the machine. Once I've paged through all of those screens, I moved to the second item in the main menu, and did the same thing...and so on until I've paged through all of the main menu items and all of the sub-menu's. Yeah, first time through you're not going to clearly understand all of the sub-menu functions, but it's not that big a deal.
Bottom line is that it took me less than an hour to set the machine up the first time. Then over the next couple weeks I'd grab the machine and page through the menu's to learn better what everything does and where it's located. I didn't do this out of a need to learn as much as just having fun playing with my new toy...all the pretty lights and such. LOL.