Many people feel that a home theatre projector system is absolutely the top of the line in home theatre technologies. While that is largely a matter of personal preference, the projector systems are priced at extremely reasonable levels these days, and as technology advances, there are very few drawbacks, compared to only a few years ago.
One of the biggest advantages is that the display image can be as large as 100 inches or even more with some manufacturers. By contrast the largest plasma or LCD screens today, or even DLP screens, max out at around 60 inches, perhaps a bit more. And with those technologies, you can expect to pay an order of magnitude more than you would for a home theatre projector system.
The biggest disadvantage to the home theatre projector systems is the viewing angle. If you are not facing the screen directly but are instead seated off to the side, the picture become fuzzy very quickly. This is a similar disadvantage to the rear projection systems available today, whereas LCD and plasma displays do not exhibit this characteristic. With any of these technologies, you should be able to watch a movie or TV program with ease in a lighted room, instead of being required to be in almost total darkness in order to enjoy the show.
The television TUBE technology is going the way of the dinosaur, at least in terms of big screen TV, since those max out at around 36 inches, perhaps a bit more. Even at that, those sets are heavy, easily exceeding 150 pounds. By contrast, the newest generation of home theatre projector systems are quite light. The projector itself typically weighs in at around 12 to 15 pounds, and can easily be transported. In fact, this ease of mobility is one of the strongest factors in favor of this projector system.
The mobility and small size of the projector is a great advantage. You could mount it from the ceiling, or even set it up on an end table or a coffee table in the room where you are going to view the output. Contast this with the humungous amount of space taken up by the modern home entertainment system, which juts out from the wall for about 3 feet and easily takes up 5 to 6 feet horizontally of floor space.
Like their plasma, DLP, or LCD cousins, the home theatre projector systems allow for the normal array of various devices to be connected into it, like your cable TV input, your satellite TV input, as well as your DVD player, your VCR, and even your PC to allow you to stream audio and video directly from your PC onto the screen.
At the higher end, there are some home theatre projector systems available now which connect to these various devices wirelessly, which avoids the rat’s nest of various gizmo cables if you have a lot of external devices to connect to the system.
Jon Arnold is an author and computer engineer who maintains various web sites variety of topics. More info on this topic can be found at his Home Theatre web site at jag-info-resourcesdotcom/home-theatre/