Home Cinema Screens
When setting up in search of a truly immersive home cinema experience, many people will focus far too much on speakers and light setup and come to their television screen only as an afterthought. Strange as this sounds, we hear it time and again do if you're not looking to get set up with a home cinema projector here's a quick guide.
If you're going for a dedicated home cinema room, which is highly recommended, you need to ignore the usual caveats from home decorators about how having a television which is too big will "dominate the room" or "shift focus." For your home theatre you want the focus to be on the screen, after all! Generally for optimum viewing think of it like this: if you can still take in the whole view in one glance then you are still just "watching television." To be completely immersed in your home cinema experience, you don't need a 25 or 26 inch screen - even if you can't afford a full project screen setup, think bigger to something like a 40 or 50 inch HD screen and you're on the right track!
Viewing Distances
Another very common mistake with home cinema setups is to sit too close to the screen or too far away from it. Again if you've got a home cinema projector system set up you'll normally be sitting at the right distance without realising it, but with television screens people often sit far too close for comfort or too far away to appreciate the quality of the picture.
The optimum viewing distance for any home cinema is the same as the best spot in a public theatre: sit so that the picture occupies 30 degrees of your total field of vision. To make life easier, have a look at the guidelines below which are designed for use with HD televisions. For non-HD screens, you need to roughly double the distances below as it is better for the eye to take in non-HD visuals in one glance.
| Screen diagonal (inches) | Ideal viewing distance (m) |
| 32 | 1.2 |
| 37 | 1.4 |
| 40 | 1.5 |
| 42 | 1.6 |
| 46/47 | 1.7 |
| 50/52 | 1.9 |
| 55/57 | 2.1 |
| 60 | 2.2 |
| 80 | 3.0 |
| 100 | 3.7 |
When you're looking for expert advice with your home cinema setup or product selections, contact Grahams on 020 7226 5500 and our brilliant staff will be delighted to help you.
