If you are looking for a fun and rewarding project, check out Home Theaters. I’ve done all the work so you’ll know exactly what you want. Be sure to click on these links for great guides and information:
Building a Home Theater From Scratch
How To Improve Your Home Theater Experience: 4K, 7.2.2 Dolby Atmos
$100 DIY HD Projector Screen
Big TVs are the way to go when it comes to really big images. They have excellent image quality, but after about 85 inches, they get very expensive for home theaters. We’ve been using projectors for years now, and they have awesome pictures, but they work best in the dark. I’ll also show you a couple of other downfalls.
Traditional Projector Downfalls
I’m going to introduce you to something called Laser TV. Once you’ve had a laser TV, you are not going to go back. There are three downfalls of traditional projectors and one of them is this – I’ve got all the lights off, and anything that gets in between the projector and the screen is going to cast a shadow on the screen. I can’t see the camera unless I cover up the projector, because I’ll get blinded if I walk in front of it.
Running the HDMI Cable to Projector
Having a projector about 14 feet away from the screen means that you’ve got to find a way to run power and an HDMI cable to the projector. I finished my basement myself, and I ran a channel there, knowing that that would be an issue so that works out great. But most of the time you don’t have that luxury, or at least most of the time.
Contrast/Lighting Challenge
The second thing you’ll notice is contrast. When I ask Alexa to turn on the basement lights, you’re going to see that the picture is very washed out. A lot of your darks are not dark anymore. This is a nice screen. I’ve used some very specific projector material that is decent quality and I’ve got a fantastic projector to produce an image on that. The difference between having the lights on and having the lights off is huge. You’re going to lose colors, you’ll lose contrast, and your darks won’t be dark. The overall experience is a lot worse when you’ve got the lights on.
Replacing Projector Lamps Over Time
The third issue is when it says it’s time to replace your lamp. Please contact your Epson projector reseller or visit epson.com to purchase a new one. This is annoying because I don’t want to pay for a new lamp every year or two. I’ve had this projector for about three and a half years, and in that time, after about 18 months is when I got the message. Then it started to flicker and die so I had to replace that lamp. It costs anywhere from about 80 to 200 dollars. It’s maintenance that you don’t want to deal with. And now here I am three and a half years in, and I’m dealing with this again.
All three of the issues that I mentioned aren’t an issue when it comes to having a TV. I have an 85-inch TV, and it’s one of the cheapest ones I could find. I paid $1,599.00 for it, so it’s a pretty good deal, and the image is stunning. It looks good, but it’s not the same as the higher-end TVs. I did a quick search and tried to find out how much the cost is per diagonal inch of TV right now, at the very bottom of the barrel. The cheapest TVs you can get and the biggest one I could find out there that is commercially available is 110 inches. That one had a price tag of $13,599.00 making it $123.62 per inch.
If you want to go bigger than that, it’s really not an option as far as the consumer market right now, I can’t buy a 150-inch or 123-inch TV. It’s just not available at this time. Maybe it will be in the future, but projectors are really your only option at this point. For a really large screen like that, possibly for a home theater, laser TVs really shine.
Laser TVs
The term laser TV is a bit of a misnomer because it’s not a TV per se. This is made up of two components. Every time you’ve got an ultra-short throw projector right here, and that’s one that sits really close to the screen. This one is maybe about 14 inches away from the screen, and it’s currently projecting a 123 inch image onto this screen. It uses a technology called ambient light rejection. This is cool stuff. It is not a traditional projector screen. It has a little bit of cool, cutting-edge technology built right in there that you can’t really see with your naked eye.
A laser TV is an ultra-short throw projector, a type of home theater device. that uses laser technology to project a large image onto a screen or wall, offering a cinema-like experience in a home setting.
Cutting Edge Technology Lighting
If we look up close at the screen, you’ll see that it basically has a sawtooth pattern. At the top of each little ridge is a little shelf or a horizontal ledge. This takes any overhead light and reflects it back up so that when you’re sitting down, you’re not going to see that, which is really cool.
Now, on the bottom, you’ve a little ledge, and that’s what’s going to take the image from a lower light source like this, the projector, so anything that’s shining up on it, and reflects that back at the viewer. It’s pretty cool technology. It’s so finite and small that you can’t see any of this at all. This is rated for at least 4k if not more. This particular screen right here rejects over 90% of the light from overhead.
I was talking earlier about lamp life being an issue with my older projectors. That is not an issue with laser projectors. This is really cool stuff. The lamp life on this one is rated for 20,000 hours. And if you’re asking how much that is, to put that in perspective, you could play games and watch movies for eight hours a day for 7 years straight before you would run out of lamp life on this thing. I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about it.
You can see on this high-quality white screen here exactly how bad this does with contrast during the day, especially compared to the ambient light rejecting Aeon CLR, it’s really kind of a night and day difference here.
What brand of Laser TV setup outshined the rest?
But why did I pick this particular projector and this particular screen? Not long ago, a couple of companies got together and they took 14 different laser TV setups, and 14 different ultra-short throw projectors. They put them, one against the other side by side, and brought in a bunch of experts to try to see which one they liked best. And you guessed it, it’s the one called Formovie. The actual model of the projector is called theater. So it’s “Formovie Theater” as the brand and model of this particular setup. Now that said, this was pitted against LG, Samsung, Hisense, and a bunch of other brands, and this thing crushed them all. That’s pretty cool. I was pretty impressed when I saw that. When I found out that Formovie had the best-rated ultra short throw projector available today, as confirmed by multiple experts, I reached out to them to see if I could get one of these projectors in my hands to try this out. So full transparency here, they did send this projector to me at no charge. That’s one of the things I shamelessly leverage as much as I can and get some free stuff when I’m doing these videos.
the projector screen itself is from a company called Elite Screens. And if you’ve been on Amazon looking for screens, you’ve probably seen these guys because they are huge. They have branches all over and they do an awesome job. I worked with one of their professionals there to try and figure out what is the best screen I can get to go with the Formovie Theater projector, and what is best for ultra short throw. We talked about a few different things, and one of them was that you want a fixed frame. You don’t want something that’s going to move in any way. You want it to be stationary and stable all the time.
LED Light Strips for the Ultimate Setup
This little bezel does a couple of things. One, it kind of makes it look like a giant TV, which I think is really fun. Number two, it makes it so that there’s a little bit of bleed area. So if the screen goes off onto that, it absorbs that light and keeps that nice crisp and sharp edge, which I love It also comes with an LED light kit, and that can be running constantly, or turn it on or off. It’s a high-end set of LED strips that go back there, and you can put these things together yourself in just a couple of hours. This combination is the ultimate setup that you can get for a laser TV. If you’re wondering about price, the cost for this whole setup right here is about $5,500 now. That is not cheap. and is not in the same price range as a smaller TV, but it’s better than anything you’re going to get if you’re trying to buy a 98 or 110-inch TV. It’s got the image, both during the day with the lights on and at night with the lights off. That’s going to be better than just about anything you’ll find.
There are cheaper screens out there, but if you want the really good stuff, this is it. Now that I’ve been using this setup for a little while. I am not going back. I don’t need my projectors anymore. It’s really no contest because this is the way to go. This particular post is one of many that I’ll be doing covering topics around home theaters. If you want to learn more about 4k projectors or home theater seating, building your own risers, or building your screens, you can check out my playlist to see more.
Click HERE for tips on how to get the best Important Components for your Network Connection.
Spring is a time for DIY Home Projects. Click HERE for Home Renovation Ideas as you Head into Spring.