Hmm
The cost of projectors and surround-sound speakers has dropped so significantly in the last decade (and you can use a Raspberry Pi as your media center) that I suspect it is within a lot of people’s means here and that this audience has splurged on other high-end electronics from time to time. I mean, I live in Eastern Europe on a local middle-class salary, and my setup was still achievable after a few months’ saving up.
Definitely, the real limitation to this setup is whether one can rent or own a standalone home. As the other person mentions, this is not an easy option for that portion of the HN readership who has moved to NY or SF. But for cinephiles elsewhere, they ought to think about such a setup and see whether they could make it happen.
Yes, I have a decent home theatre, and my partner and I enjoy watching shows and movies on it most nights we're home.
But going to a beautiful old cinema to watch a classic movie on a huge screen, is a whole different experience, and one that most movie enthusiasts relish from time to time, regardless of what setup they have at home.
No matter how affordable/practical it is to build a home theatre for many of us here, it still won't be for many people, and we can still find it sad that the ability to experience old movies in the kinds of theatres where they were originally shown is being wound back by changing corporate interests.
As to space, you can put your collapsible screen in front of bookshelves, windows, doors etc So they take up less useful space than a large TV.
I'd be surprised if a good short throw 4K projector is $1k (but if you've got recs within that range I'm very interested)
A normal projector is 11+ feet from the screen. The diagonal being approximately the same as the distance from the projector to the screen.
I have seen short throw 4K projectors from around 1,500$ but IMO they are a poor fit for home theater as the screen ends up as a bright object in people’s view.
Also, when going with girlfriend or children, the cinema is twice or triple as expensive.
I think you're missing the point. I have a fairly decent home cinema setup and rarely go to the cinema but there are some films that deserve viewing on the big screen. For me these are films such as Casablanca, Apocalypse Now, Alien, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Star Wars (original), Close Encounters. These were movies made where the "cinematography" had the cinema in mind, not a home cinema system (because they basically didn't exist unless you were extremely well off). Seeing these films in the cinema is, for me anyway, a genuinely different experience.
HOWEVER, the major downside in comparison to a cinema is that there's nothing stopping me from pulling out my phone, or keeping my notifications on, or pausing it to go do something else. The level of immersion in a difficult to watch film can be totally destroyed (e.g. good luck trying to sit through the Turin Horse in your living room, the mood of the film will be totally destroyed by a few pauses).
The walls won’t reflect too much light if you take adequate measures so that they are not pure white and uncovered. For me, the challenge of setting up the home cinema was not the reflecting light of the walls, inasmuch as they could be covered with bookshelves. Rather, it was the acoustics when I have large windows in the room – I could cover them with Ikea’s fully opaque curtains so that light isn’t a problem, but the glass of the windowpanes still has a detrimental effect on the sound.
In my case, I've a timed lock I put my phone away with ("just stop doing it" doesn't really work with me, 100% addicted) when I watch a film I actually want to pay attention to at home. No way my attention span could handle something like Bela Tarr at home (I'm a fidgety unfocused person and always have been), but for the most part it done the job.
RE: the space, it's hard to get a good setup with rented accommodation, or small accommodation (currently in a studio apartment). I'm sure I'll eventually have a place where I can set up an amazing system.
My current apartment has woodchip wallpaper and nowhere to hang a screen from, so I'm hacking together ~80inch screen project (have an old bed frame I chopped up and repurposed as a room divider that I'm gonna add a roller blind and curtains onto that I'm pretty sure will kind of work...)
That doesn’t seem to stop the people I’ve seen at the cinema, tapping away on their phones for the entire movie. I would love to go to a movie theatre that is:
1) tastefully decorated like an old-timey cinema and spotlessly clean
2) reasonably priced, both in food and ticket prices, so that families can afford to go
3) strict in its policies of restricting technology (no phone use in the theatre whatsoever) and mandating parental accompaniment for children
4) offers both healthy snacks and classic ones like popcorn, and does not use any fake butter or garbage like that
Fortunately there is a theater near me in the East Village that sometimes shows older stuff, and I saw 2001 in 70mm there and it was awesome.
The projector-wall distance was no more than 5m. A short throw projector can work with even less distance.
So absolutely doable in a small space.
I'm never going back to a regular TV.
Audio at the theater was better, but I haven't invested much beyond a 2.0 setup.
At $11/ticket (pretty normal around here), the break-even point is ~200 movies. You have to B-Y-O-BluRay but at least you can rewatch those for free.
EDIT: oh and I don't have to smell buttery nacho cheese from the person sitting next to me, and fight over the cupholder