Home Theater System

Video

The TV is one of the most important aspects of a home entertainment system, because the main purpose of a home entertainment system is to watch movies, or motion picture. Thus, the picture has to be not only large, but clear and accurate as well. With the wonderful invention of the DVD, we are now able to have better quality picture at home than at the actual movie theaters! DVD stores the pictures digitally, while almost every cinema still displays the movie from a film projector. Although few people can actually get a big screen the size in the cinema, you can get quite close however; home projectors can project images of hundreds of inches diagonally... but will also cost thousands of dollars. But you do not need such a large screen at home because you will be sitting so much closer to the screen than in the cinema (although some do like to sit in the front row). Actually, depending on the size of your living room, you may not need a TV big as you originally wanted.

My living room is pretty small, so I couldn’t get a very large TV even if I wanted to. I got the Toshiba 34HF83 TheaterWide HD-Ready TV. It's a 34 inch direct-view widescreen HDTV. A direct-view TV displays the image on its surface, unlike rear projection TVs, which displays the image from a projector from behind the screen. I prefer direct-view TVs because it usually has better picture quality and a wider viewing angle. However, direct-view TVs' size can only be 36 inches at most, because anything larger would be inefficient in term of size and heat. That's why for a long time, the home theater market was mainly dominated by large rear projection TVs. Of course now-a-days, new and better technology is starting to take over, like plasma, LCD, and more recently, DLP TVs. But I'm not going to go into that because I don't plan on getting one, mainly because of value.

The Importance of Widescreen

My biggest advice is to get a WIDESCREEN TV. Period. It is better, not just in my opinion, but overall. Yes, you heard what I said. Why you ask? Well, there are several widescreen vs fullscreen sites that can give a much better and deeper explanation than I can. And for more credibility, go here for an excerpt from the textbook, Understanding Movies.

Note: Widescreen TVs are only better when you actually watch the original widescreen movies. The whole point of widescreen TVs is to reproduce the true scope of a movie as seen in the cinema. Actually, I don't have anything against regular sized TVs (I had one for most of my life), but I do hate "fullscreen" versions of movies. Don't get fooled by the name, foolscreen does NOT show more of the picture. Its technical term is "pan and scan," in which an editor edits/crops/mutilates a work of art just so it can "fit" your TV... Would you crop the Mona Lisa just to have it "fit" nicely in your living room?