OK, each to their own.
But if you genuinely don’t understand I can explain from my perspective.
For me, it’s really nice to cuddle up with my SO and watch a show or movie together – just like watching something at a cinema or theatre, but more comfortable. And the show usually provokes conversation afterwards; what was bad or good, what bits we didn’t understand, sometimes things like philosophical or ethical questions. So I don’t see it as TV -or- conversation.
Ah, I recall having this conversation before. I find watching movies in bed on the tablet to be cozy and comfortable, but to each his own. It also helps that I’m nearsighted, so the tablet is effectively a giant movie screen.
Anyway, that’s beside the point. We seem to share the same aversion to TV, but apparently we differ when it comes to movies – I’m a real movie hound.
But let me supplement my earlier comments with this humble observation. You’re possibly overthinking this. Just go out and get a freaking TV to start with. Even if (like me) you just turn it on once every one or two months, it’s still a useful household item and may turn out to be more useful than you think for streaming, gaming, or worthwhile TV content like news or any sports you enjoy. I certainly have no regrets about buying my latest Sony Bravia which was still fairly expensive at the time, but they’re much cheaper now as you know. And I don’t even have cable (though I do have an antenna and get all the local channels).
If you don’t want to do a lot of research about TVs, IMO you can’t go wrong with Sony Bravia – I have two and my son recently bought the 70" OLED version and loves it – so all you need to worry about is size. I understand the aversion to a gigantic monolith staring over the room, the lord of all it surveys, but if that bothers you just get a smaller one.
After you get the TV you can consider options like a sound bar or speakers and home theater amp (I’d get two good speakers and not worry about surround). Then you can consider options like streaming via laptop w/HDMI or a dedicated streaming box like Roku.
And on a personal note, if you watch no movies whatsoever IMHO you’re missing out on a big chunk of the world of entertainment. As a movie hound I’m of course biased, but I’m also impatient and easily bored, and if I find certain good movies absorbing, funny, or otherwise entertaining, I suspect so would you. There are a lot of good suggestions in the CS “Movies you’ve seen recently” thread.
Google News just offered me this article. Maybe a briefcase TV is for you.
Another option to avoid the black monolith on the wall look is to put it in or behind a cabinet with a mechanism to raise it to viewing level.
I have a Quest 2 and use it pretty regularly. As mentioned upthread the tours of historic places tend to be shorter than a traditional movie, and they take advantage of the 3-D better such as navigating around within the ISS.
The games I play are mostly the puzzle type where the headset tracks your hands and lets you move items within the environment. However, surprisingly to me, the game I play most often is a boxing workout with a sound track of a huge variety of music. Like many other occulus games there is a free trial available that lets you test drive it.
Looks like a cool idea. I’ve never been particularly fond of wall-mounted TVs anyway. Several people I know have them mounted above a fireplace, which in one sense is good because the fireplace tends to be central to the room with furniture arranged around it, but it’s just too damn high.
Mine sits atop a small cabinet, finished in dark oak, that I got from the business division of IKEA and meant as office furniture. Behind the doors I keep various video-related equipment and supplies. The height puts the center of the TV screen at just about eye level when you’re sitting on a couch.
100%
Van Gogh is on now.
We just bought a 65" but we have a big living room.
I’m going to follow this a bit. I’m hard of hearing and see that there are glasses that CC for you. But I’m skeptical, very skeptical. But it is a type of VR I suppose.
They probably work one on one with no background noise. One on one, I can figure things out with other cues, expressions, context. We communicate in many ways.
I’m having dinner in a restaurant with eight other people on Tuesday. I’m sort of dreading it. I’ll make out about 50% of what people are saying, maybe. My wife will be there so that will help a lot.
Sorry for hi-jack but VR is interesting to me because of my hearing. I’m not ready to take that step. Yet.
(Yes I have hearing aids, but they don’t cover up the tinnitus. That’s just there)
Then don’t get a TV! At some point, you’ll either be bullied by your friends into needing a TV or they won’t care and it will never come up. Don’t prematurely optimize this.
Arrange your apartment best for the views. If you ever later want to add a large screen, a projector is easy to retrofit. You can get a standard pull down screen instead of a motorized one and they’re cheap and light and just take two screws into a stud to install. If you put a console behind your couch, it’s easy to just put the projector on the console and it means you can even hide it when not in use.
I think you’re way over-estimating the difficulty of using your tablet as a screen. First, figure out where in the apartment you most prefer to watch TV (the benefits of a mobile screen is that this can be many places. eg: I know where to put my laptop in the kitchen to watch a show as I’m cooking and there’s a little stand I’ve jerryrigged in the bathroom for especially long #2s), then figure out where you would ideally like the screen to be relative to your body and then figure out how to get the screen to that place ergonomically. There’s lots of solutions on Amazon for all sorts of different ways you would want to position a screen but I’ve usually found a strategic deployment of pillows does a good enough job for 90+% of situations.
Again, I’d say, depending on the type of person you are, think more carefully about the sound than the visuals. Tiny screens usually have pretty terrible built in audio so being able to wirelessly stream audio either to headphones or a dedicated speaker will greatly make a tiny screen feel more like a full featured TV.
All the more reason to stop reading about it and start gaining experience. Keep in mind that these things are evolving very rapidly and you’ll probably find you want to get the latest and greatest every couple of years. If you’re on board with the Apple ecosystem that would be a fine option, but since you’ll likely be more discerning about what matters to you after spending some time with ANY rig, I think it makes sense to spend less now and plan to spend more on the really killer system that comes out next.
In my case, I’ve been using the Quest 2 with a third-party headstrap very happily now for a couple of years, and although I totally get the appeal of the higher end models I’m quite content to wait until the next round - it will only get better and the Quest 2 is marvelous.
The Quest 2 costs $200 now and will teach you everything you need to know in order to make a well-informed choice, in a month or in a year.
I predict you will grow tired of watching movies on a Quest 2. I have one, and it gives you a big virtual screen, but the headset will become hot and uncomfortable, you’ll feel isolated from the room, and the pixel density on the virtual screen and the contrast will be lower than you’d like. I hear the Apple Vision Pro is a better movie watching experience, but it’s also heavy - and $3500.
There are now projectors that you can set on a table under a screen and have it project up onto the screen. You can set it up like a regular TV, with a retractable screen. Or, if your walls are white or a light gray or something like that, you can just project onto the wall. Your ‘TV’ then just becomes a little box on a shelf or on a table, and a wall.
The new short throw projectors generally use laser light sources, so they are quiet and you never have to change bulbs or anything, They just work. They range in price from $129 to $5,000. The cheap ones are surprisingly good. We bought one of the $129 ones so we could watch hockey in our hot tub. We set the projector up behind us and display the game right on the opened cover of the tub, which is gray. It works great.
I built a home theater with a 102" screen and a projector, and I love it. Sports are awesome on a big screen. It was also cheaper than a 70" TV to go with a projector.
any low-end make or model you could recommend?
I have a Quest 2 that I probably haven’t put on in a year or more. I can watch Netflix on it but the headset itself isn’t particularly comfortable. It’s not bad but it’s not the same as nothing.
@Sam_Stone. Thank you. You may have just solved this for me. I mostly wanted room-unobtrusive but perceptually large-screen TV, with a small side order of VR flythough experiences / gaming.
Ref @Al128’s query … Sam do you have any example products or model numbers I can search (of whatever price) just to ensure I get my search anchored in the right neigbhorhood?
I still intend to get a Quest or whatever for the side order use case that’s mostly recumbent, but for the mainstream entertainment case you may have nailed it.
@Nars_Glinley: I’ve been wearing equipment clamped to my face or head for hours at a time for decades until I retired. That might be an issue for me and it might not. We’ll see. Thanks for the warning.
What kind of budget are you looking at?
For modern projectors, the key requirement for you may be brightness. Thr cheaper projectors aren’t as bright, meaning you need to have quite a dark room to keep from washing out the image. Brighter projectors can be used in a well lit room.
I find ProjectorCentral to be an excellent web site for projector information. Here’s a review of a mid-range ‘laser TV’ projector:
The projectors that project upwards onto the wall are called ‘ultra short throw’ projectors. Here’s a list of them:
https://www.projectorcentral.com/projectors-ultra-short-throw.htm
The cheapest of those that are true HD is about $1,000.
The cheaper projectors are ‘short throw’, and they sit in front of the screen. They might meed to be 1.5-6 feet from the screen, so they can be mounted on the ceiling or placed on a coffee table or something like that. They start at $129 or so.
For a screen you can mount a fixed screen on the wall or project onto the wall, or you can get a powered screen that lowers when you turn on the projector or rises from the floor or from the table the projector is on. When closed it’s just a decorative box near the ceiling or at the back of a cabinet. Fixed screens start under $100 and go to maybe $1,000, depending on size, material, etc. The motorized ones start around $300 and go up to over $3,000.
Here’s an example of a,manual pull-down screen:
And one of the cheaper motorized ones:
Feel free to ask any questions.
A few thousand is fine. 10K and up is probably not given my current level of video-whatever consumption. If I turned into an addict …
I don’t need to spend for prestige sake and if I can run an experiment or two for a couple hundred each and determine that’s enough (or not enough), I’ll happily triangulate / successively approximate to my eventual set up even if I have a few left-over starter gizmos at the end.
This whole project will be on hold for probably a couple of months; my goal with this thread at this time was general feasibility to inform my other long-lead time furniture selections, room use planning, etc. Not specific actions to lock in a plan.
After I catch up on these cites I think that I’m nearing that hold point. But anyone who wants to add more, feel free.
TL;DR check workflow / hassle factor of any solution, that for everyday use is more of a gatekeeper than quality of reproduction
a piece of advice:
We have an (oldish) short-throw projector at home and a great 3x6m white wall where we make some movie nights with the girls - last one was the Taylor Swift Concert movie.
Having said that, while technically not a pain in the butt, it is enough “work” setting it up, plugging it in, conecting it to the comp and set up the BT-audio - we basically use it 3 x per year … all minor things to do, none of which takes longer than 1min … yet it becomes a “hassle”, as the cables are dirty/dusty, etc… and we - instaead - fall back to “watching it on our 32" tv set is good enough”
So based on that, my advice would be (both for projector and VR) to get a cheap one, see if the process and workflow works for you medium-long term (say if you still use it after 3 months like you did the first week) … and just THEN go for the Lexus version of that (and get wow’d again).
my rationale: better to have $129,- worth of gadgets parked in some cabinet than 2.129,- …
(Aside) this talk of projectors makes me think of a guy I knew in the late 1990s. By no means wealthy so I don’t know how he got his hands on it, but the projector he used for TV was something similar to this:
(At the time I knew him, it was a huge box sitting on his garage floor in need of servicing.)
Three tube projectors were all over the place back before digital trchnology. An uncle had one - it was a huge box with the projector inside pointing up at a mirror which reflected the image onto a screen in the box.
They were very dim, and the ‘big screen’ was smaller than a large TV today, and the viewing angle was so poor that if you sat off to the side even a little the image was pretty much wiped out. On some it was so bad that the edges of the picture were demonstrably dimmer than the center, even from a perfect viewing position.
They cost thousands of dollars, and had to be meticulously calibrated to register all the guns on exactly the right spot or you’d get blurring and color fringes. And you’d have to get a technician to come in to recalibrate them from time to time, like tuning a piano.
Ah, those were the days.
These new laser projectors with upward facing lenses are the modern equivalent of those, but oh so much better.
A note of caution, you generally can’t go with cheap screens for UST projectors. Because of the extreme angle, screens generally are required to be tensioned because even slight ripples affect the image quality and are best with Ambient Light Rejection again, because of the angle. Unless you have no other options for a space, I’ve found USTs to be more hassle than they’re worth because of how picky everything is to get a good image.
That’s very interesting. I had not considered that aspect, but it seems to be a very valid point. Even a wall would show every little imperfection or even dust when shining an image at an extreme angle, I guess. Do the UST screens use a special material over other screens? Like a smoother finish or something?
UST sounds like a great solution for apartment dwellers who can’t really install projector mounts, easily run power and video to a projector, etc, which has always been a limiting factor for projector adoption.