Home Theater

Moving into my first single-occupancy apartment in the U.S., I soon realized that your floorplan can limit what kinds of furniture you can use. This is all fine and good, since I have no furniture save my SleepNumber bed, but I soon realized that TV placement would become a problem. I have a fireplace, which naturally becomes the focal point of the living room, and as it is at an angle, any furniture placed on the adjacent wall can easily protrude in front of the fireplace. My options are thus limited to flat panels... or so I thought.

Flat panels are actually a poor option for me because I cannot do anything to conceal the cords in an apartment. So, hanging a flat panel above the mantle would mean having cords draping as both a firehazard and an eyesore. The only way to avoid the mess, I discovered, was through a front-projection system.

Front projectors have really come down in price. The best deal I came across was the Optoma HD70 Home Theater Projector, which is designed for home theater and can display HDTV signals at 720P, projected onto the screen of your choice. So for under $1000, you can essentially grab yourself a 100" TV. There are a few catches, however. Extra costs include a screen (around $100) and a mount, which can be found on eBay to avoid getting robbed. The mounting location for the projector should be somewhere you can string cords. (In my situation, this would still be an eye-sore, but at least you don't see it when watching a movie because it's all behind you.)

The projector is user friendly, but you have to feed it content by attaching a DVD player, cable box, etc., i.e. there is no internal TV tuner. If you really want HDTV content without paying for a TV subscription, you will have to dish out an extra $100 for an ATSC tuner for your computer, which can then be fed into the unit. If you don't want to hook your computer straight up to the projector, you can use your computer to record shows, then wirelessly synch them with an AppleTV ($399) connected to the unit.

Front projection has one additional expense for owners of Nintendo Wii. Because the "sensor bar" on the Wii must be placed at the screen, the cord is unlikely to reach all the way from the projector. (Playing Wii Tennis on 100"+ is almost the only practical & comfortable way to get 4 player action without assaulting each other by accident.) Fortunately, NO DATA is transmitted through the sensor bar cord; it is only power! Therefore, a good electrician should be able to swap the cord out for batteries, build his/her own using IR LEDs from RadioShack, or buy a Wii Wireless Sensor Bar for around $20.

When I was about to buy the projector, however, I went into Audio Advice on Glenwood Ave in Raleigh and was blown away by their setup of a Sony 50" SXRD rear projection HDTV,only 15" deep. The slim profile makes it very usable in my floor plan (on the floor!) and has breathtaking smoothness to the image. The video processing makes standard 480i signals look great, but does introduce some lag, which means video games should either be fed through a progressive signal (which the low-end model doesn't try to enhance) or be played in the TV's "Game Mode", which turns off processing. SXRD is just Sony's brand of LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon), which avoids the "rainbow affect" of DLP (Digital Light Processing), the biggest rear-projection technology competition. If you can save up, I highly recommend the SXRD units for 50" and up. Of course, you could also save by getting a refurb of last year's model KDS-50A2000.

Oh, if anybody is interested in those "Ambilight" TVs from Philips that illuminate the wall with color from the screen... you can also get decent discounts on refurbs for those direct from Philips.