I'm looking to buy a remote shutter control unit for my 1200d to make it easier for my wife to snap her Guinea pigs I'm looking at getting one with an LCD but I'm not sure what this adds, or would I be better just getting a simpler plain button one. Looking at this one
Just stick with a basic one - no batteries required and dead simple. The one you linked to seems to be for astrophotography.
I've used that one (or one strikingly similar). I never had a problem with it until my 40D died and I got a 60D to replace it. The remote interface on the camera body changed, and I ended up cutting off the plug on the intervalometer and soldering on a mini-jack (which is the new standard). It continued to work for a while longer, but for some reason I can't get it to work anymore. Batteries were never really a concern. I used two standard AA batteries, and I never had to replace them because the device uses such little power. After it stopped working, I suspected the batteries might have been bad so I replaced them with a couple of rechargeable AAs. That didn't help. I cut the mini-jack and replaced it, thinking maybe the solder joints had separated. No joy. The display works, and from what I can tell on the display all of the functions work. It just doesn't make the camera work anymore. All in all, it worked for a few years, and now it doesn't. I've not yet determined the actual problem, so I can't say for sure that the intervalometer itself is bad. My next step is to use my multimeter to make sure the it's sending a signal, but I'm still debating on whether a $10-15 intervalometer that lasts a few years is worth this much effort. I might just buy a new one.
If you have a phone with a IR blaster built in, it might be worth trying out one of the free apps on the google play store like this one for example. If it does the job, great, saved a tenner, if not, no harm.
This sentence confused the hell out of me until realised I had stumbled into the photography section. I thought a 1200d was some kind of corsair case.
The LCD version have an intervalometer function, this operates the shutter regularly at set intervals over a period and is mainly used for time-lapses or star-trails. Just get the plain button version for piggles.
