Hi all, I am after some basic information around my plans for a small home cinema in a house I am looking to buy. I always wanted a home cinema but other things took priority. .... Somewhere to relax watching a film/football and the odd gaming session. I will want to connect a macmini/pc and xbox one to them as a minimum.
I think that if you're going to the trouble to build a room especially for projection then you should dispense with the idea of a TV altogether and make it a dedicated projection space. You'll have TVs in the house for casual viewing. This space should be something special. It should have a real 'wow!' factor that makes going in there an event in itself. To that end here's what I'd do if given the space...
(1) colour scheme - give this some though before you plan anything. Furniture isn't available in every shade under the sun, so it's much easier to pick the furniture colours first and then use that as a starting point for room colours.
There's value in the screen wall being black as it will deliver the highest contrast with the picture when all the lights are off, but that doesn't mean that the whole room has to be black to match. There are plenty of other matte tones that work almost as well for light absorption and still allow some artistic expression and design pizazz so that even when not in use the room still makes a statement that enhances the property. As examples, look at Dulux colours such as dragon's blood red, venetian crystal or bitter chocolate as a starting point for multi-tonal colour schemes. You could even go with tones of grey.
(2) put in good lighting, and lots of it! When a room is colour designed to absorb stray light then iot will do exactly that with any room lighting you use. Also have a think about some decent light control gear. Something that can handle three or four circuits and be programmes with lighting preset patterns as well as allowing manual override really is a solid investment.
(3) build a false wall and go for a fixed screen on it. The false wall will give you the space to hide the speakers behind the (acoustically transparent) screen or simply behind cloth covered panels beneath the screen so that sound appears magically from the screen itself. The benefits here extend beyond copying what's done in commercial cinemas. The area inside the wall can be lined with foam to become sound absorbing as well as being a useful way to hide some wires. This means the front speakers will have an easier job of producing intelligable sound and so you can (if needed) dial back the speaker budget a little. It also allows you to go for a larger screen.
(4) spec a projector with the right sort of throw ratio that will do 21:9 and 16:9 in your room; then spec a 21:9 screen to match it.
From the description you'd like the room to fulfil a few different roles: Gaming, TV viewing, streaming and serious film viewing. When doing the first three on that list the image will be 16:9 in most cases. Sometime the image quality will be great. At other times it will be less than stellar. Your consistently best quality image will be Blu-ray movies. But when watching films on a 16:9 screen you'll lose part of the screen area above and below to the black bars. This means your best quality source ends up giving the smallest picture, and your lowest quality sources give the biggest picture. That's a bit backwards when you think about it. Projectors have zoom lenses; they can reduce or enlarge the picture from a fixed position (such as a ceiling mount). This means that you could have the projector zoom up Blu-ray to the biggest screen size the room and throw will allow, and then zoom down for sports viewing, TV and gaming where the more compact image concentrates the light more so that you can run with some room light on, and the smaller image is more forgiving of poorer quality sources, and your gaming experience is enhanced because you're not trying to take in a 3m wide view when playing CoD or GT6. The other thing is that 21:9 screens just look so damned cool. Every house has 16:9 tellies. How many people do you know with a 21:9 cinemascope image?
(5) add some device to control everything (or as much as can be controlled) but don't use a tablet.
This is about winning over your partner/wife/significant other and the rest of the household if applicable. While the room might be your domain, very often there's someone else involved in financial decisions of this kind. That's important because when it comes to upgrade time it's much easier to get the green light if the rest of the household have really enjoyed using the space too. The way that happens is by making it so easy that it's foolproof. That means no calls when you're bombing down the motorway "How do I put a film on/watch TV/set up a game for the kids?" Tablets are cool and we all like them and enjoy finding new ways to use them, but despite a plethora of programs and apps promising to be able to control stuff the bottom line is these things are still a bit of a gimmick until you start spending some serious wedge (£1,000+).
There are two other issues. The first is usability. Tablets go to sleep and engage the screen lockout. If you just want to pause the film of change the volume do you really want to unlock the tablet and then make sure it connects to the Wi-Fi and then wake up the app and perhaps even scroll through a couple screens looking for the right control page. Wouldn't it be easier to pick up a remote that controls everything and just hit pause or the volume?
The other issue is the temptation to stay connected with social media etc. You can't check out the news feeds or log in to Facebook or respond to Twitter/Snapchat/WhatsApp because they're all push notification applications that keep nagging for attention.
Handheld system remotes seem like something of an indulgence. Why spend money on yet another remote to do what all the remotes already do that came with the bits of gear? On the face of it that's a difficult thing to argue against, except when you're trying to tell someone over the phone which buttons to press just to watch a movie off Sky. The other common problem they solve is to remedy an attack by the button pushers. These are the times when someone came in to the room, tried to make the system work but failed because they changed all the inputs and settings. One simple press of the remote can cure all that. As a starting point have a look at Harmony remotes. They're relatively inexpensive and have enough power to take care of small to medium sized systems. If you want something more bespoke with a bigger touchscreen area then there are other products on the market.
