jack gilbert
Auditioning
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2002
- Messages
- 6
I found the Home Theater Forum site through today’s Wall Street Journal article. I’m a new Forum member in need of very basic advice.
I have a room I want to make into a home theater. I will use it to watch dvds and play my home made digital videos that I edit on a mac computer. The audience will be two or three people most of the time.
Sound matters very little to me – I suppose I’ll use my old pair of Advent large stereo speakers. Surround sound doesn’t seem important.
It’s picture quality that I care about, although I’m not a fanatic – up to now, I’ve never had anything larger than a 19-inch TV – without digital cable. I don’t even have a dvd player yet – I’m a real primitive by the standards of this place, I guess.
What I do have is an empty, carpeted, rectangular room with ten-foot ceilings. It measures twelve feet wide and fifteen feet deep. So the maximum screen size/viewing area is ten feet high by twelve feet wide. In addition, the back of the room is open. There is no wall. It opens into another room. So a video projector can be placed as far as thirty feet away from the screen.
My threshold decision is what type of viewing hardware to get: a 36-inch Wega, an even bigger HDTV, a 60-inch rear projection TV, or a video projector. The latter fascinates me, but I know very little about it. I will sacrifice the supposedly near-perfect picture quality of a Wega for the impact of filling up an entire wall with the projected image of a projector – as long as that image is reasonably sharp.
That’s calls for a subjective judgment, but I don’t know anybody with a video projector in their home, so I’m at a loss as to how to make such a decision. I’ve read about projectors, know the replacement bulbs are expensive, and that the cost will be in the range of the above-mentioned alternatives – $3K or more including a movie screen.
All of that is OK with me. I am assuming that a good projector can be had for around $2K-3K and a screen for $1K. If it takes more $, however, to get a truly decent picture, then I’ll consider that too. But I’m no perfectionist.
The few local vendors I have talked with (briefly) seem to contradict each other, and seem to have their own agenda: some hate projectors and push Wegas, etc. etc.
I’m in no special hurry. I probably won’t make a decision for months, so I’m glad I found this site early on.
I confuse easily but nevertheless eagerly await your advice.
I have a room I want to make into a home theater. I will use it to watch dvds and play my home made digital videos that I edit on a mac computer. The audience will be two or three people most of the time.
Sound matters very little to me – I suppose I’ll use my old pair of Advent large stereo speakers. Surround sound doesn’t seem important.
It’s picture quality that I care about, although I’m not a fanatic – up to now, I’ve never had anything larger than a 19-inch TV – without digital cable. I don’t even have a dvd player yet – I’m a real primitive by the standards of this place, I guess.
What I do have is an empty, carpeted, rectangular room with ten-foot ceilings. It measures twelve feet wide and fifteen feet deep. So the maximum screen size/viewing area is ten feet high by twelve feet wide. In addition, the back of the room is open. There is no wall. It opens into another room. So a video projector can be placed as far as thirty feet away from the screen.
My threshold decision is what type of viewing hardware to get: a 36-inch Wega, an even bigger HDTV, a 60-inch rear projection TV, or a video projector. The latter fascinates me, but I know very little about it. I will sacrifice the supposedly near-perfect picture quality of a Wega for the impact of filling up an entire wall with the projected image of a projector – as long as that image is reasonably sharp.
That’s calls for a subjective judgment, but I don’t know anybody with a video projector in their home, so I’m at a loss as to how to make such a decision. I’ve read about projectors, know the replacement bulbs are expensive, and that the cost will be in the range of the above-mentioned alternatives – $3K or more including a movie screen.
All of that is OK with me. I am assuming that a good projector can be had for around $2K-3K and a screen for $1K. If it takes more $, however, to get a truly decent picture, then I’ll consider that too. But I’m no perfectionist.
The few local vendors I have talked with (briefly) seem to contradict each other, and seem to have their own agenda: some hate projectors and push Wegas, etc. etc.
I’m in no special hurry. I probably won’t make a decision for months, so I’m glad I found this site early on.
I confuse easily but nevertheless eagerly await your advice.
