The Christmas shopping season has begun, and even Santa could use some help when it comes to buying electronic goodies.
Stay tuned to WWTW in the coming week for articles on how to buy the best audio system – and projector set-up – for your movie room.
I’d also love to hear some home theater tips from my readers. Did you get burned on a new HDTV recently? Any bits of advice you’d like to share?
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Goodness! For a minute there, just reading the headline, I thought you were going to buy ME one.
The one bit of advice that I try to stress to people is buy the biggest television that will fit the space that it will occupy. Even go so far as to buy some poster board and cut it out to the basic dimensions of a given set, Crutchfield is good resource for television dimensions, because they have the dimensions of all the televisions listed. The biggest complaint people have, according to Consumer Reports, is that they wished they had bought a bigger set, not that they spent too much.
Now that you know how big the television is go out and buy one that fits your budget. Don’t get too caught up in LCD/Plasma, they both have their plusses and minues and unless you are buying a Sony XBR8, then any television will have compromises. Human vision being what it is you will quickly get accustomed to any visual quirk that the television has. Unless you are one of those unfortunate few that can see the rainbowing on a DLP set.
A good message board for AV related discussions is the AVSforums, but an internet message board in my opinion has very low signal to noise ratio and really caters to those that know about the subject that folks are discussing.
Then, the next thing to consider is your sound system. You basically have three options here. A low cost Home Theatre In a Box (HTIB), a higher end HTIB, or seperates.
Each option has their plusses and minuses, but I tend to steer Home Theatres noobs to a medium range HTIB, because even the cheapest HTIB will have orders of magnitude better sound then anything coming out of that television. Oh and pay no attention to reviews about a televisions sound, budget at least a couple of hundred bucks for the cheapest HTIB system you can get. Keep in mind that most HTIB will not be upgradeable, but you might be able to repurose this if you go to seperates by moving it into the bedroom, or any other room in the house that has a television (finished basement room or workshop).
A good set of seperates will end up costing you about 2K-3K. Budget at least 1K (or at least 1.5K) for the speakers and the rest invest in a decent receiver and movie player, preferably a medium range Blu-Ray player or upconverting DVD player. I would go for Blu-Ray, because the players are coming down in price and they do a good job of upconverting your existing movie libray and they also play Blu-Rays.
Other then that you get into a lot of specifics on different tech type talk and you can’t get two AV type folks to agree on what is the best and what should people buy.
Wow, that was long, sorry for the long comment.
i agree with dimitrios i spent about 6 months researching what type of tv to get and it gave me a headache. if you want to go large the best bet in my opinion is DLP. i bought a 58 in Samsung DLP 1080 last black friday and got a really good deal on it. it was just about the highest rated model at the time and it looks amazing. i have never been able to notice a rainbow effect. the nice thing about samsung is that they make ultra thin dlps so it is sleek and thin which is nice. i was able to pick it up for 1500.00. i have a HTIB which sounds great especially watching blu-rays in DTS MA 7.1. my blu ray player of choice is my PS3 since it is easily updated through the wireless connection for the many firmware updates required. i plan on getting a projector in a couple years for my basement but i have to finish my basement first
Yeah, for the larger screens you can’t beat the economics of using a DLP television. There are plasma’s and I think LCD’s in the >58″ realm, but damn they are very very expensive, but I think the man wanted some comments on projectors and I ended up writing the war and peace comment response on LCD/Plasma….
I have seen 1080P projectors offered from cut rate prices, <2.5K or so, but their picture quality is suspect and don’t even look at projector’s offered for 1k-2k, those are beyond awful. I hate to sound elitist, but anyone that buys a cheap projector will not be happy with it. Especially if they go to their friends house with a 2nd tier no name brand plasma or LCD. There is simply no way to economically manufacture a good projector for a reasonable amount of money. Unfortunately projector’s are a niche in the HD market, so economies of scale don’t kick in to help to bring the higher priced projector’s down in price and there really isn’t a lot of competition in the projector market space. So, there really isn’t much market pressure on the projector manufacturers to do what the LCD/Plasma manufacturers have been able to accomplish in the past 5 years.
When you really start to take a look at projector’s the ones that will give you the same sort of picture quality as that 46inch XBR8 will end up costing you on the order of 10K, give or take 1K or so. That being said that top of the line 100 inch projector will give you the best image hands down. No LCD or plasma can touch those top of the line projector’s video quality. I went to the local stereo store and saw them demo their top of the line projector and the image was beyond description good.