Skip to main content

Personal Theater On A Budget

The Dream

By now you should realized that I really enjoy watching movies. My dream of a home theater started many years ago with a 27" tube TV and a surround sound system connected to my VCR. The dream was short lived when we moved to our current house. It was fun while it lasted.

Fast forward to the kids and wife moving out and a huge digital movie collection. What is a single person suppose to do. Going to the movies is expensive. Sure you can get a 75" 4K TV for $1000 on sale but you really don't get the full theater affect with crystal sharp images. Granted with some of the motion of these new movies, you need good HD quality to make sense of the scenes that are always being shaken in action movies but what about the classic movies that have not been seen on the big screen for so long.

Ingredients

The new dream started with the Amazon Prime Day sale with a 1080p projector on sale for $50. Going through a closet, we add a full size bed sheet that hasn't been used in years. Pick up some 1"x2"x8' boards at for $3 a piece ($12 total for four). Dust off an old set of computer speakers with subwoofer for stereo sound. Find some hold hardware to attach the screen to a basement wall. Add an old chrome cast or HDM converter for a tablet and you get an 8' personal home theater on a budget (dog critic not included). I hope to add a surround sound system in the future for the full home theater experience.

Uses

Primary use for this personal theater is obviously for watching movies. I find that older movies especially darker movies like Underworld or space movies like Battlestar Galactica or The Black Hole are very enjoyable to watch on my personal home theater. Animated movies are also great fun to watch. Can anyone name the animated movie below? If so, you have great taste in movies.


So my blog is primarily about digital movies. I would be neglecting at least one more use that you can add to this home theater. For less than $100, you can also add a Retropie gaming system and play classic games like never before. Whatever you decide to do, a personal home theater system is a great idea for the whole family. What other uses can you think of?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Protecting Your Online Collection

 Protecting Your Collection In this time of cyber crime, you want to protect your investment of digital movies. I will be focusing this page on the primary retailers that connect with Movies Anywhere. At the time of this post, I am only aware of Google and iTunes are the only two retailers that offer secondary authentication. Technically, Amazon offers a secondary authentication with the use of a pin for digital purchases. I highly recommend you use these security feature provided by Amazon, Google, and iTunes. This provides great protection for your collection and any saved credit card information that you have with the retailer. I would not advise keeping your credit card information with a online retailer but I understand it's convenience. With that said, I will point out that users have the ability to removed their credit card information from Amazon, FandangoNow, Google, iTunes (provided you are not using Family Sharing), and Microsoft. This is convenient when one of the retai...

Avengers: Endgame - Review

Movie Review - Spoiler Free I will try to keep this a spoiler free review. First, I would like to applaud Disney/Marvel for making a movie over the 2 hour limit that most movies have kept themselves to lately. The movie would have felt rushed if it was only 2 hours. The movie starts out appropriately timed to the events of Avengers: Infinity War. The movie kept you emotional invested throughout the entire movie. There was some predictability with the story but for the most part, I was able to enjoy the ride without knowing what would happen next. This to me made the movie extremely enjoyable. We get see how the characters deal with the aftermath of the Infinity War and what their options are moving forward. Each character was given their opportunity on screen during the movie. This is obviously easier to do since there are fewer characters after the events of Infinity War. I felt that many characters had an appropriate conclusion to their stories. The movie did leave me with a couple ...

Digital Ownership

 What Is? With the digital revolution, digital media has been sweeping the world. My memory of digital media was back with iTunes in 2001. There you could download music with a touch of a button from an actual retailer vs illegally with the bonus of malware to your computer. I actually had digital music from iTunes before I had a iPod or iPhone to play it on. In 2005, Apple released their video iPod and started to "sell" digital TV and movies. I am not saying Apple was the foundation for the digital revolution but it was my first positive experience with digital media. My first digital video purchase was the unaired Aquaman TV pilot as it was the only place to get it. What does purchasing something digitally really mean though? Apple and Amazon are coming under class-action lawsuits for their digital ownership definition of "buy" an item. The lawsuit stems from the fine print where retailers cannot guarantee you own the product but merely have unlimited streaming. T...