New TV Quest: Analysis Paralysis

It started with a little bit of flat-screen TV envy. Every time I visited someone's home and gawked at their shiny new plasma or LCD TV, my living room setup felt a little 20th century: I had a 28-inch, old school TV with a backside as big as a fridge, and a stereo whose most modern feature was its two (count 'em!) cassette tape players. I did have a TiVo, but that only increased my feeling that I should be doing a better job of being a modern electronic citizen. Here's what my setup looked like:

You don't even want to know what was happening behind the console. So began my year-long quest to join the flat screen masses. I coughed up $26 for a one-year online subscription to Consumer Reports, whose overview of HDTV and all the various TV options was pretty useful. I also started visiting tons of TV showrooms in New York City: the Sony home entertainment complex, Samsung's similar version in the Time Warner Center, J&R, and on and on and on.

Then I went to Brooklyn. Specifically, to Park Slope, where some friends had recently settled into a newly renovated brownstone. That's when I fell in love. Perched on their rear living room wall was a dictionary-sized front projector. The kind most of us have seen in conference rooms, inflicting PowerPoint punishment on groggy employees. But this projector -- an Optoma H31 -- actually delivered a show worth watching. In crisp, high-contrast resolution, this gadget spawned a movie-screen worthy image on the opposite wall.

Measured diagonally, the display must have been -- I don't know...80? 90? maybe 100 inches?. And even though I later learned the projector was a few years old, I tell you friends, the image was stunning. Turns out that in the past few years, projectors capable of delivering pristine video have dipped to mortal-friendly prices. The biggest limiting factors? You need a wall big enough to display the goods, another facing-wall on which to position the projector, and the ability to limit the amount of ambient light.

For those readers not interested in the minutiae of how I got from start to finish, let me jump to the punch line and show you what I ended up with:

I am now the proud owner of an incredibly sleek, jaw-droppingly fancy, home entertainment center. And the best thing is, I don't have a gargantuan TV overcrowding my living room. Setting the whole thing up taxed every inch of my now TV-saturated brain, but that's okay, since I don't really work anymore: I just spend my time grabbing strangers off the street and bringing them up to my apartment to show them the following collection:

Here's a quick tour:

:: The projector, a sleek little number from Panasonic with the artless name, the PT-AX100U. Thanks to a timely rebate offer, I snagged this unit for a little less than $1500.

:: The displayed picture. One hundred and ten inches (measured diagonally) of high definition glory. I've got the picture projected directly on our living room wall. There's a special paint called Screen Goo that I might coat the wall with -- mainly to improve the picture during the day, when bright sunlight can wash out the colors, but we don't actually do much daytime TV watching, so I'm not sure that's even necessary.

:: The set-top box. A high-definition DVR from TimeWarner cable.

:: A Mac Mini, which serves as my DVD player, CD player, and living room Web browser. Stocked with iTunes, this baby lets me pull songs, shows, and movies from the iTunes Store, or from any of the other Macs in our apartment. Ditto all the photo slideshows stored on the other Macs. (That's all possible, of course, thanks to my WiFi network that's powered by an Apple Extreme Base Station. Mac addict? Me? Guilty.)

:: Home Theater Receiver. This guy, an Onkyo TX-SR674, is the control center of the whole rig. Setting it up was about as easy as eating jello with chopsticks, but the device's basic premise is pretty straightforward: you attach all the components you want to see and hear, and then you run wires from the receiver to the speakers and the projector. It's also got a radio tuner built in.

:: Speakers. Okay, I confess: my cup runneth over -- way over -- in the electronics lottery department. My parents had recently decided they no longer wanted these high-end Bang & Olufsen speakers (Beolab 8000). They're almost a decade old, but I had them checked out at a B&O dealer here in New York and they got a quick tuneup. They sound as good as they look.

:: Nintendo Wii. Upside: Even though I hadn't played video games in 20 years, I was playing tennis and driving monster trucks about four minutes after I had this thing out of the box. Now that's it on the big screen I don't play after I've had a big meal: the images are rollercoaster-intense. Downside: I almost clocked my wife swinging the remote control during an intense tennis match. This thing can get you in the zone, quickly. You've been warned.

I'll have more to say about where I did my research, who I spoke to, and how I got all these devices to play nicely with each other. But for now let me end with the single best piece of advice I got: "Dude," said the salesman from B&H (New York's electronics superstore), "at some point you got to stop researching, and you got to start buying."