The movie screen in your home

The latest breed of digital home theatre projectors are a vast improvement on old-time home movies.

If you have had enough with simply "watching TV" and are eager to move up to the home theatre experience, then switch to projection television. Most home projectors promise to take home cinema to its ultimate limits.

The best part: your viewing experience is not restricted by the physical constraints imposed by a TV tube. With a front projector system, an entire wall of your lounge becomes your TV screen and movies appear as they would in cinema auditoria.

When one hears the term "projector", it reminds us of flickering images of long-ago home movies. Or dim, grainy ballgames viewed at a sports bar. Or maybe just the zillionth PowerPoint slideshow you yawned through at the office. But none of those experiences will prepare you for what the latest digital home theatre projectors can do.

Present-day home theatre projectors lend a comforting option for a satisfying viewing experience. You can mount it permanently in your living room, television room or take it from room to room. If you have more of a dedicated home theatre in mind (or if you want to keep your projector out of the reach of small children), then mount it on the ceiling. This makes for a neat, uncluttered look.

How does this new breed of front projectors create such big, beautiful images? Projectors come in two basic technologies "" LCD (essentially three tiny liquid crystal display devices with a series of mirrors and lenses) and Digital Light Processing (that replaces the three LCDs with a silicon chip).

They are so compact and lightweight that they can be hidden on a bookshelf, entirely out of view. And the viewing screen, because it contains none of the electronics, can be paper-thin and placed directly against a wall, saving a great deal of space as compared to a large screened television.

For the uninitiated, home theatre projectors are perfect as they are ready to go as soon as they are out of the carton. Plug it into power and then plug it into the viewing device and voila! No additional set-up or convergence is required.

Loosely put, resolution refers to the number of lines of picture image displayed on screen. Hence, the greater the resolution, the greater the picture quality.

"A standard TV signal displayed on a standard TV set consists of 480 lines of resolution. High-definition signals or HDTV, on the other hand, contain more than 700 lines, hence their superior quality," explains Sandeep Yederi, business head, enterprise network solutions, Panasonic.

SVGA and XGA are currently the most common resolutions in the marketplace. SVGA, being of lower resolution (800 pixels wide x 600 pixels high), is less expensive than XGA (1,024 pixels x 768 pixels).

Another plus is that home theatre projectors can easily be joined with any digital device. For instance, plug your DVD player into it to watch movies or your home computer to surf the Internet as a family. Another use could be to watch and play video games by plugging it into your game machine.

Even your TV and camcorders can be connected to your multi-purpose home theatre projector to bring it life-size imagery. With the avalanche of terrific DVD material available, plus the expanding amount and availability of HDTV programmes, now is the perfect time to raise your home theatre to the next level.

Remember that a projector does not come with a sound system, so you will need to connect an equally gratifying speaker system to complement the wide area viewing.

The price hit, for a home projector, would be between Rs 18,000 and Rs 55,000, with 75 per cent of the projectors falling somewhere within the Rs 20,000-40,000 bracket.

However, resolution and brightness in particular can dictate the price of a projector, as can its size. An acceptable SVGA data projector with a list price of less than Rs 22,000 is ideal for most home users.

Keep in mind that to get the best results from your projector, you need to use it in a large room. "A portable home theatre projector system is also less expensive (by cost-per-viewing-inch) than large format LCD panels and projects a picture that is much brighter than the typically dingy CRT images," says Yederi.

The players, like Epson, Panasonic, BenQ, NEC, Mitsubishi, Sanyo and others are hoping that home theatre enthusiasts will finally be able to experience a picture that's as big as the sonic image from their surround sound systems. And when the picture and sound really sync up, the effect is pure magic.

So, next time you have a weekend party, just ensure that you have a home theatre projector and screen "" or better, just project it onto a blank white wall "" and you are ready with your very own cinema-like experience, right in your own home. Pass the popcorn, dim the lights, and get ready for real home theatre!