Real Home Theater. ^_^

Pics are kinda terrible. I tried my best within the constraints of my limited amount of patience and my desire to play with my new toy. Part of the prob is I can't get the camera in the best spot to take good pics, and I don't really have any ideal room for it. Don't have a remote trigger either, so any blurriness is a result of my hand on the camera and not the projector's fault. Same thing with color. Color is beautiful in actuality but some of these pics really get it wrong. The ones of will smith look terrible but i included them anyway. They really don't represent what's on the screen. The best overall are the robot pics but the projector does it better.

I'm projecting a 106" diagonal from 10' away with an epson 8500ub. I thought going over 100" might be too big from my seating distance of about 9' but it is great. For now i'm projecting onto a primed wall. It hasn't even been painted yet and the picture almost made me cream my pants when i first fired it up. I didn't order a screen so that I could figure out what size was best. Next step is to order some materials to compare, but frankly i might jsut go with white walls for a while. It looks that good. The biggest IQ problem is that the room has a white ceiling and light colored walls. These cause major reflections that can really hurt black levels compared to what i know the projector is capable of (short of the ultra high-end JVC projectors, it's got the best blacks).

Just a couch for seating. This things final place will be in my new living room. I won't have a dedicated space for it. I'm debating getting either a grey screen or a draper hi power. The projector does make noise, but when I'm playing a movie I don't hear it b/c I have the volume up fairly high so that I feel the impact of the sound. I need the grey to give me better blacks in an all white room though. The High Power can be used for the same thing but it works differently but has some projector placement limitations, which I think I might be fine with now that I have it. The high power has a gain of 3 which makes it much betterfor watching during the day because it is very good at rejecting light that doesn't make contact from straight in front of the screen. You still need light control, but it apparently does wonders for the perceived image quality. The light really does bounce around in light colored room. Since the projector will be in a living room, the ceiling is the biggest issue. That's the #1 black level killer. I may have to get creative there. Thinking about some sort of valence with rails jutting out of it that I can use to roll-out 5ft of black velvet fabric and then hide when I'm not watching anything. I could put a drop down screen in the same enclosure. I'll need to think about it though. That said, I'm really nitpicking here. Most people would be floored by the image as-is. There's just no comparison to a plasma or any other small screen. Something like a kuro will have a small edge in absolute image quality, but I can fit 4+ 50" Kuros in my screen area. The overall effect is on a totally different scale. For speakers I'm following dolby recs for speaker placement. Surrounds are at 110 deg. My fronts are at the edge of the screen toed-in. Center is just under the image. I actually have pretty damned good acoustics in this room right now. The bubbles in teh water scene of I Robot were awesome. It was like I was in the water. Speakers are Paradigm Reference all around (studio 40 fronts, cc-470 center, adp-470). When I get a new job though i'm upgrading the audio even though it's pretty spectacular right now. Plan to give the old system to my father. And I Robot isnt' a bad movie. It's entertaining. I bought it mostly as a tech demo disc though. ;p The picture quality in that movie is outstanding. I'm watching star trek again right now and ditto for that.

"Interesting" experience today. Was watching TDK and during the shotgun blasts in the opening sequence, my receiver was shutting off. There is tons of bass energy in these blasts. When I had the volume at -10 or -15, it would turn off. At -20 it was ok. It turns out there was a short being caused by a loose speaker cable. Everything would be fine but the percussive blasts from the shotgun would make the loose wire touch the opposing terminal, it would short, and the receiver would turn off to save itself and my speaker. Thankfully, this mechanism works, and there was no damage to equipment. The wire came loose when my brother was remounting the rears after we had to move some stuff. They are mounted flush against the wall but I'm gonna order some spades and hopefully they will fit and I can avoid anything like this ever happening again.

No, I was using bare wire since the surrounds are wall-mounted and there's no room for bananas. I've ordered some spades though. Hopefully they will fit. I'm already using bananas on the amp side of the cable though. I think it's intimidating for people that aren't really in to home theater. There's a lot that you have to become familiar with if you want optimal results. I did a lot of research before I bought one. Setting up a projector definitely seems more complicated to someone that doesn't know any better. The other big reason is distribution. You really don't see projectors in big box stores. If they were there, and properly setup in a relatively dark room, i'm convinced they would sell. People think you need a dedicated room for them and I really don't think that's the case. What you do need is a big blank wall though, and WAF is obviously a factor there for many people. :P