Big screens

Just upgraded from my 37" monitor shown here, a little fire damaged but working fine:


Decided to go for a Sanyo 720p projector and 110" fixed screen which actually worked out about 30% cheaper than the LCD.




It looks a bit blurry and washed out in the photo's, but in actual use it's crystal clear and black levels are as good as the LCD. Games and movies are an experience, to say the least;)

Anyone else got a large screen computer based home theater system and feel like posting some photo's?

I think the next time you're thinking of spending money on a big tele you should buy a new carpet instead.

Personally I think a massive tele like that is horrible in a room that size, it's basically suggesting that your life revolves around staring at a screen rather than socialising.

Further more is you want to watch something like the news or the weather you don't want to close all the curtains and wait for lamps to warm up for 5 minutes, you just want it to switch on.

Regarding gaming and cinema though I'm sure it's very impressive, although your sofa should really be about 3 times further away than it is. But I'm guessing that's not possible due to the size/shape of the room, which leads me back in a neat circle to my previous comments.

Buy a new carpet.

Erm, it's a rented house so I'm not buying my landlord a few thousand dollars of new carpet. The furniture is mine, not the carpet.

Just because I like to enjoy watching a movie on a large screen, does that mean I don't socialise? That's a pretty big jump of logic, or perhaps I'm missing something.

I agree, the sofa is too close. My fiance also agrees, but we haven't completely decided on the locations of everything. I was more hoping to see some photo's of other people's setup.

NICE! :)

Although spend 100% of PC time if front of that in a dark room, your eyes and skin will turn albino like and you will develop a strong aversion to sunlight. Eventually all you friends will be annoyed and worried when you start staring longingly at their necks. :P

Seriously though, you aught to get a spotlight to illuminate the keyboard area, and something else lit at a different distance (like the end of the room) to focus on occasionally, otherwise you will mess up your eyes.

Ps, whats with the cheezy pole, did you nick it from a wedding or something? Our beer "trophies" were always roadsigns & cones :/

There is a lamp nearby, but I turned it off for the last photo. Also, I have a usb hub, keyboard, mouse and small monitor running from the same computer into a seperate room where "normal" computing can be done. It's a two story- house so the computer is hidden under a staircase, out of sight. Keeps the noise level down a little.

With that pole, its part of the house, and we aren't allowed to paint it even though it's marked. SO decided that flowers are the go, and I always let her decide how the interior of the house looks.

Nice. Now if you can figure out how to walk about and talk to your PC it will be great.

Arrrgh.. too many icons!!!!!!!


nice projector though! :)

The best I've come up with is a pc remote control. They're not too bad, but it takes some time to setup apps that are controlled by it. I have got ZoomPlayer and WinAmp done well enough that I don't need anything other than the remote to launch/use them. There's 2 TB of hard drive in the pc to eliminate disc swapping.

Nonsense. He has plenty more icon space!

I have a projector room upstairs which is ace for movies. I haven't tried coding on it though. My PC has a 40inch TV connected as a second screen and that is ace 1920x1080. My game looks brilliant on it.

Why does your 37" monitor have a chimney?! o.O

Look closely. It's actually a bong. lol.

haha well hid my friend ... NOT (or should that be fiend) ;-)

seeing as its sswift ive no idea if its a real product (ok i know these exist for some sad reason like the fish tank one) or something hes just done in 5 mins ;)

It's a real product, on Amazon. :-)

haha cool. Also if your plasma overheats, it's perfect!

Maybe the screen is too small, i can still see some walls...

one of my brothers cats knows tjhe warm spot on his 32" LCD TV
instead of being able to sit ontop of the tv like she used to being as lcd's are thinner than crt's by miles she just sits infront of it spoiling the view

o.O i think its a bit scarry. wheres the space to live?. By "plug 'n play" they meen youve to put other hardware, not people.

You orginally asked for pictures of peoples setups so heres mine:



Playing with a sharp clawed kitten is definatly an experiance!

He has a new cat bed now from that photo:



Its electricly heated

You're seeing one corner of a much larger room.

I don't live on the wall, so the screen is not an issue here. The projector has about the same footprint as a dvd player.

I guess an obese person might have a problem heaving themself around in here though.

You know it's not gonna be long before we have screens that are as big, light, and flexible as the one you have hanging on the wall there. It wasn't all that long ago we were still using CRT's. I give it 5-10 years, tops.

They'll also probably roll down from the ceiling like the projector screens they have in schools so that you don't have your whole wall filled with TV all the time. You could put photos and things behind it then.

Either that, or it'll be a hard screen that's transparent when off, and opaque when on. They're already working on that technology.

Absolutely, I think it will be great. Hang your TV wherever you want.

I just want a nice, rigid OLED screen of between 24 and 26 inch diagonal at 1920x1200 resolution.

I'm fine with having the screen on the wall.

I did look at the pull-up and pull-down screens, but they have some problems like curling, rippling etc...

I'm happy with everything, other than the seating position. As mentioned it needs to be further back. There's a huge L-shaped workstation at the back of the room which I need to disassemble and relocate to another room. Then I can move the seating back to about 2 times the width of the screen which is about the right distance.

I still use a philips 109B4 =D

I haven't owned a TV since the late nineties, and I don't miss it. TV sucks.

Sometimes, I already think that my 24" screen is too big for gaming. It's just too much input for the eyes, so I guess there really is a reason why they advice in the game booklets to use small screens for playing. Especially when you play in a dark room.

I watch movies mostly on my notebook (17") or on my 20" iMac. My girl friend is even happy with her 12" PowerBook.

I'm currently at work and don't have any pictures of my desk here. I've got a nice one when I still had four computers with five screens on it. It's not as spectatcular as that huge screen, but I like it. ;-)

My plasma is great for console games. I can stand up in front of it and use wireless controllers.

Vinylpusher:
I have a 24" screen. It seemed like too much when I got it after using a 19" for the longest time. Now it, like my 19" still doesn't seem like enough; especially when I'm working in an app like photoshop and I need to have a lot of documents open and I want to be able to reference any of them at any time.

What I need when doing that is something at least twice and wide as tall as my current screen. Something with a resolution of like 3840x2400. And I bet even with that I still won't have enough workspace.

Course that might be too much for gaming, unless I have a second desk several feet back from my first one. :-)

Looks like a nice setup but I too would be a little put off by having to have the room dark in order to see the screen well. I think I might also be put off by the relatively low dot-pitch. I mean, for a screen that size you'd really like to have a few thousand pixels across the screen, which of course needs a beefier graphics card (or several).

Being projected, though, are the pixels clearly defined and crisply cornered or are they a bit blurry up-close?

I agree about the constant expansin of screens, though. In a few years the prices for really big screens will come down and maybe you'll see 8-10 foot screens with 8192x4096 resolution for a few hundred?

I'd love to do visual art displays/presentations/demos on a really big high-resolution screen. I'm aiming for it.

I only have a 20" screen. Anything bigger wouldn't fit in here. Was looking at projectors at Best Buy the other day too, and boy are those things expensive. What resolution can you run at using one? Does it work with all resolutions and aspect ratios? Guessing no, since your board thing seems to fit widescreen (guessing 16:10).

Anyway, this is my meager setup. Not a lot of room for stuff in here. You can also see my microbes (syphilis and black death) in that. Can't see my owl though. Shame, it's adorable.



Personally, I think my setup looks comfier than yours, just because it seems like you'd have to be bent over on a couch in order to type. Either that, or you put the board on your lap, in which case it'd just be awkward to type on. Guessing you also need to have the lights out with that, which would piss me off to no end (I like light, geeks who don't like light are weird).

I still do, I have a 21" Viewsonic G810, had it for years.

That seems to be a sort of rocking chair above. I find this interesting.

EDIT:
And what also appears to be jars of sweeties under the bed.

EDIT:
A fridge too?

Some sort of food stash under the bed?

I keep my food under my bed. The jars are jars of peaches. There is also soup, crackers, soda, juice, donuts (they will be gone in a day or two), various microwave food, chips, beef jerky, peanut butter/jam, vitamins, and salt and pepper. That's not counting what's in the fridge. You don't get to have any of it, puki.

The chair is a cheap dorm chair that I'm not very fond of, but have nowhere to put and so my office chair is not here. The only alternative was a hard, metal one. Fridge was $50, not very nice but it does the job.

Very nice pictures.

And Boomboom, very cute cat! :)
All my cat does is sleep and eat. She's pretty chunky.

I'm still using an old 17" CRT with my PC - it's fine for my needs (i.e. just farting about on the intertube).

Just got a lovely Panasonic 26" LCD TV to replace the old portable in my bedroom. Glad I didn't get a bigger screen, TBH - I don't want to be able to see individual pixels from the other side of the room. It also has a VGA input for PC but I haven't tried it out, yet.

Its 16:9 and the native resolution is 1280*720. Like an lcd monitor, you get the best quality at the native rez, but it will scale up/down any other resolutions. You'll get the black bars with 4:3 and 2.35:1, but it can be zoomed or stretched if you prefer, either by the pc or the projector. Pixels are pretty damn sharp. Certainly a lot better than you would think. College and school setups aren't a good comparison, as all the ones I have seen tend to look blurry, and have the image hanging off the screen or not filling it, while the gentle breeze blows the pull-down screen around. I think this relates to slack-ass setup regarding focus and screen/projector positioning by the owners.

Some of the reasons I chose a fixed screen. No wind rippling problems, no curling, and image is always positioned exactly right

You really need to look at a home theater projector, not a presentation projector. There's big differences between them. You also need to see them set up properly in the right viewing environment, which does not mean a display model sitting on a few boxes in a brightly lit store pointing at the not-so-white wall. The best description I can think of is that it's like a large LCD monitor with regards to clarity. It did take a few hours of setting up to get the image to that kind of quality as the menus are fairly daunting. It's worthwhile spending this time to calibrate everything though, as it makes a big difference. I tried to take some photo's up close to the screen, but they always turn out heaps blurrier than they should be.

You can have a little light coming in the room as long as it doesn't hit the screen, but if you have too much then the black levels will suffer. I also found that the light from the projector goes through the screen, hits the wall, and reflects back onto the screen from behind. This was also causing the light to leak from around the outside of the black frame as it doesn't sit completely flush with the wall. So, I used a piece of black satin and cut/taped that to the back of the screen. This gives darker black levels, plus the light leaking around the frame was annoying. It made the screen look like it was possessed/holy, like it had just gained a level or something. lol.

I did a bit of looking around at various models around $2000, and the Sanyo PLV-Z5 pretty much offers the best bang for buck. The screen was $600. You'll want a decent length lead running from the projector to the pc as well so you have flexibility with the placement, so that can cost around $100 in itself too. This is all in Australian dollars. Lamps are around $500, and they last around 3000 hours given a clean and cool environment and regular filter cleaning. The fans in it were temperature controlled, but I set them to go at max speed all the time, as the heat is the worst enemy of the lamp. Also, by switching to lamp economy mode the life is increased also. If I need more punch in the image, then there's plenty of room for increasing brightness/contrast. The projector has a 3 year warranty, the screen 10 years, the lamp 90 days. Apparently the lamps tend to blow within the first hundred hours if they're defective, so I'm putting a few hours on it before the 90 days is up.

The next step up is a 1080p which does native 1920*1080, and costs around $3000.

Yes it is slightly annoying about needing the room dark, but I have pull-down blinds here. The lamp takes less than 1 minute to come to full brightness from power on, NOT 5 minutes like the convenient exaggeration made previously. In that time I can pull the blinds, so it doesn't really bother me to spend this small time when I'd be watching a movie for an hour and a half or more. At the end of it, it takes less than a minute for the blinds to be up again.

The keyboard and mouse are temporary. This is for movies, not TV, or programming or anything else. Maybe play a video game every now and then, but I rarely ever do that any more. One of the remote controls on the table is for the pc.

Pure Cane Soda:

I have microbe Mad Cow Disease (I forgot the scientific name already...) and I was really happy to find out I'm not the only one that enjoys little (or really large?) stuffed micro organisms.

And for the fridge and food... I'm getting a lot of good ideas for when I leave for college next year.

Dont spoil it :-P
My hamster is more active than that!

BSE
Bovine something or other

see also cjd
crotsfeld jakobs [sp] desease the human strain

the one thing missing from the foot and mouth pyres was an effigy of one ronald McDonald ;)
perhaps bonefire night :))

Ya, i think fat cats are funny though.
And shes not morbidly obese, like some cats. :)

My cat is all super fluffy and fat in winter, and all short haired and skinny in summer. :/

Also known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy

And I bet you didn't know that Leptospirosis (Weil's disease) that is mostly carried by rats is also found in cattle as well as many other animals.
The disease is rare in humans who mainly contract it by not cleaning and covering wounds or washing there hands before eating/smoking.

Pure Cane Soda: How many w*nk mags have you managed to fit under that extra high bed? Or wait, I forgot, you've got Internet access...

They're Linux User mags - that's why he's hiding them.

lol @ Grey Alien. Indeed.

Did no one else notice this?


wtf

@ sswift - Have you considered a multi-screen setup? I never found a single monitor (regardless of size) to ever do the trick, so I rigged my old 15" CRT up to use for references while I Photoshop on my 17" LCD.


At any rate, I like that blind-screen idea where you roll it up when you're done, I believe that's actually possible with an OLED screen no?
(I recall them being flexible to a degree)

I have my TV connected, but I don't use it regularly.

I don't think current OLED screens are flexible enough to roll up like I described quite yet, unless you rolled them onto a tube of significant enugh diameter, say, 2-3".

But, when you said blind-screen you gave me another idea.

You could, with an inflexible technology, make a screen that works similar to a venetian blind. A bunch of slats, which you either hang vertically, or horizontally.

Vertically hanging would probably be easier because you could have a mounting bracket to guide them then, rather than trying to have some sort of side brackets on an extendible mount of some kind.

You would of course have small gaps between each screen, but with a screen of that size, you wouldn't notice that since you'd be sitting so far back. You may however notice swaying of the blinds if they're not mounted on both the top and the bottom.