Hmmm.
I must weigh in now, too.
My experience with PanelMates was that they were far superior to the oringal panelviews for graphic representations, scaling and communication flexibility, and most certainly reliability.
Their DH+ drivers were smartly done, making them almost impervious to stuck button syndrome, and you did not have to stock a whole 'nuther device to use a different protocol. (fewer spares) The piggy back comm card, much like a KT card, would do DH+ or RIO, in addition to the 2 serial ports that were fully configurable.
I once used one page as a terminal window and it would display the ascii output of port A on an old Max Control Servo controller.
Yes, you can master the Panlemate in minutes with a few good examples. You can do wrap-around or clamped input value limiting with no PLC code.
You can use expressions to build scaling, create boolean expressions to animate graphics, and just about any math funcion you would expect on your scinetific calculator is availible including binary hex ascii, and trig functions.
This is probably the most important feature that made them so darn flexible. There was really no need to write PLC code to do all sorts of complex limit checking, scaling and data management. Our tire machines literally had less than a dozen lines of code to handle setting drum widths. They were very efficient because of the availibily of complex expressions in most any field where a tag can go.
PanelMate Power Series and Pro from 1200 through the 3000 are a very solid invest of your HMI dollars. They won't lie to you and tie you up for days researching technotes and applying patches either.
The most impressive thing for me was ease of use, solid, clean firmware, drivers, and programming software.
You know the code is cleaner whn you can download a 16 page HMI app in 25 seconds at 38.4k. Try that wth a Panelview.
I have never ever, no matter what succeeded in using a Panelview without adding ladder logic. Any panelbuilder32 application that does much of anything will lie to you unless you write ladder logic to force the truth out of it. That is my biggest complaint about the a/b offering, and my defense of the CH units.
I was so much more productive with them, they were intuitive to use with the touchpanels, and side buttons. The keyswitch feature and simple alarming and password schemes were very useful too.
Our failures with them were only with non coated ciruits and ususlly resulted in lines in hte graphics or watchdog faults.
Those with conformal coating never gave much trouble at all in our high-sulphur atmosphere.
[/soapbox]
PiEaCe