If you are considering setting up a home theater system, then there are three basic components to consider. They are the screen, the speakers and the player. Two of these components are directly linked to the size of the room in which you will be seated and where you will be seated.
All DVD players over a certain price are pretty good and you ought to listen to a few to make up your mind. The same with speakers, although how many you will need is reliant on the dimensions of the room. The screen is more important and that is what I want to discuss here.
It will not really be of very much help to you to just go into a department store which stocks fifty or sixty television sets all in a line. You may find that you have a preference for one screen's colour display over another, but the colours are controllable anyway by brightness, contrast and colour mix. You need to view the screen as it will be seen in your home theater.
In order to do this, I always advise getting a pen, paper, preferably graph paper, and a rule. Draw in the proportions of the room to the largest scale that the sheet of paper allows, maybe one inch for two feet or there abouts. Then draw a line to represent the screen against whichever wall you choose and finally add a few squares for the seating. Now measure the space between them and write that figure down, because it is very important.
Using our scale above, if the gap on paper between the screen and the seating is five inches, the distance in the room will be ten feet and ten feet is 120 inches. A good rule of thumb, when trying to work out screen size is the same one used for paintings, which is that the ideal viewing distance of a picture is between three and five times its diagonal measurement. Therefore, in our example, the ideal screen size should be between 40 and 24 inches. Nevertheless, many experts put a minimum screen size for a home theater at 28 inches.
That may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you, because a lot of people think that the solution is the bigger the better. However, primed with this information, now go to the TV store and look at the models again. You will find that if you get up too close to some sorts of screen the picture becomes rather poor, particularly with conventional television screens. Plasma and HDTV permit you to get a little closer without losing quality.
Another factor is your age, or at least, the quality of your eyesight. Would you rather watch the film with your glasses on or off? Off for me, so I would tend towards the higher end of our scale or maybe even go above it. My eyes are not going to get any better, but I can always put my glasses on when the time comes that I cannot see my screen properly anymore. However, I want to put that time off for a while yet, so I would go for a 48 inch screen in this example for my home theater. Plasma, if I could afford it.
More Information:
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with
Home Theater Screens. If you are interested in a
Home Movie Theatre, please click through to our site.
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