Want a badass home theater? Get a projector.
When I was in college, I had a job working in an electronics store selling TVs. It rubbed off on me, because I ended up buying one of the TVs I sold the most: a 32″ Sony CRT HDTV. It was nice. My roommates and I all enjoyed it. But it was somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds. When I moved to San Francisco, I decided to leave it and go with, purely to be practical, a projector. Nice and portable!
Well, now I have to admit years later, I’m totally sold on projection, not just for the convenience factor, but also because, if you’re willing to invest a considerable amount of time and effort, projectors can become the centerpiece of a jaw-dropping home theater experience.
I recently moved to a bigger apartment, and as part of the upgrade process, I ended up getting an even better home theater projector. I won’t lie and say I was excited to set it up: honestly, it can be a long, time consuming project if you want to do it right.
It ended up taking a couple long weekends to get everything done, but I’m quite satisfied with how
everything turned out. This wasn’t your typical normal home theater hookup either. The lion’s share of the time doing the setup was spent on things like “sanding the ceiling.” But if you want a real home theater, you’re gonna end up having to do some work for it. No, the picture of the setup to the right is not of my setup, but it gives you an example of just how serious some people can get about it.
But more on all that in a bit. First, the practical concerns. There are a few questions you must ask yourself if you’re interested in setting up a projector. The projector’s natural enemy is ambient light. If you’re in a room with a lot of outside light, it’s still feasible — you can get blackout curtains or blinds, or if you believe you won’t really be watching your projector during daylight hours, go for it.
The other thing to consider is cable management. With most conventional TVs, the cable you run between your display and your sources is negligible and can usually be hidden fairly easily. That’s not the case with projectors. By necessity, projectors have to be far away from the viewing area, and are typically mounted high, on the ceiling. That doesn’t mean your only choice is to have cables lying across your living room floor. As you’ll see, the setup we have in our place manages to avoid this. But you really have to work.
The benefit, of course, is the size of the image. For our setup, I measured 115″ when the projector is displaying a 4:3 image. Of course, 16:9 is a bit smaller, but I’m not complaining. But man is it fun to play Geometry Wars on that. The cats go crazy about it. And all true HD programming looks fantastic.
So, onto implementation: That image on the left is a picture of our projector, mounted in its final resting place. The mounting alone was actually a big headache for us. You see, we live in an apartment complex, and while management is just fine with us drilling into the walls and making whatever holes we need, the ceiling is a different story. It’s made of concrete, and we were told that damaging it could be very, very bad. So we opted against that. Instead, we cheated. The projector is, in fact, on a mount. And it’s mounted from above, just as intended. But it’s not attached to the ceiling. Instead, we ended up basically installing a shelf that’s screwed into the wall. The shelf is, of course, pressed up against the ceiling, and we mounted the projector from the bottom of it. It’s definitely an improvisation, but it works just fine.
The other problem we had with trying to figure out how to mount the projector had to do with cable management. Essentially, we had to figure out how to get a VGA (which carries both PC VGA and Component video signals) and a composite video (for older sources or playing the NES on an 8′ screen) cable across the room. So we went with cable molding, a product Home Depot sells for fairly cheap, and we were going to run that across our ceiling. But of course that was easier said than done.
For some godforsaken reason, our ceiling is “popcorned” — it’s that textured surface that’s rough and bumpy. It was impossible to get any cable molding to stick to it. So we ended up sanding down a strip of the popcorn across the ceiling so we could run our molding. We later learned, much to our chagrin, that it’s much easier to take off popcorn just by using a damp towel. Leave and learn. Anyway, here’s what our cable management solution ended up looking like:
For convenience, we’re also using the same molding to carry speaker wire to the rear channel speakers in our surround sound system. And as a side note, you should clear it up with your manager or landlord before tearing up your ceiling. Fortunately we live in a place where they’re pretty tolerant to that sort of thing.
Once you have those two things figured out, the rest is pretty easy. I say that relatively, of course. Have a little fun with it. We sure did. Here are some pics of our setup, as it stands now. Don’t mind the first couple pictures where it’s hard to see the screen: I had to turn up the ambient light for the photos:
This is a photo taken with all that ambient light turned off. By the way, the warm green glow coming from the media table is provided by an LED lighting system, called DIODER, from Ikea. You can connect a lot of these lights together, and they all sync to a single source, so it slowly cycles through the color spectrum. It’s a really neat effect.
So yeah, if you have the time and dedication to spend building up your home theater, it’s pretty hard to go wrong with a projector.
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:24 pm
That looks like an amazing set up. I’m jealous.
February 3rd, 2008 at 4:50 am
Well,the problem with projectors is to that they are quite expensive, a 720p projector easily costs two or three times that of a normal HDTV.
I would also get a projector if I could, but at the moment I still live with my mother and sister so it wouldn’t be worth it. Once I start working properly, in 5-7 years or so (thanks to studying) I will probably get a projector providing a proper solution and will make my room a home theater or porn heaven.
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