The family room goes digital

Michael Rogers Columnist • Profile • E-mail

For many Americans, the family room is where more living happens than the living room.  Increasingly it’s also the media room, the place where family and friends gather to watch movies and sports events on big screens or the kids hang out for video games.  And perhaps most uniquely, it’s also where the family watches its own media—family videos or photos that once sat on a shelf or in an album, but which can now be far more accessible for spontaneous viewing. 

As far as big video screens go, Digital Life’s installment “The Transforming Digital Living Room” provides a run-down on the pros and cons of plasma, LCD and cathode ray tube viewing.  But one newer wrinkle that can make good sense in the family room is front-projection video — something of a high-tech throw-back to the old flickering film projector. 

Until recently, video projectors tended to be high-end equipment from specialty companies like Runco and Barco, with five-figure price tags, generally found hanging from the ceilings of private screening rooms in Bel-Air.  Recently, however, a handful of home theater projectors have started to fall below $2000, making them competitive with other big screen alternatives.  The InFocus 4850, for example, at around $1000, weighs under 7 pounds and can throw up to a 9 foot image.  For $1500 the Optoma Movie Time DV10 includes not only a projector, but a DVD player and audio system as well in one self-contained unit.  These low-cost projectors provide just about the picture resolution of a DVD — if you can spend a bit over $2000, two excellent higher definition projectors are the Panasonic PT-AE700U and the Sanyo PLV-Z3, which will give you the extra sharpness of HDTV.

Unless you’re building a separate media room, projectors may be a bit more awkward than just hanging a nice flat LCD or plasma on the wall.  You’ll need a screen, and most likely the ability to at least partially darken the room. Da-Lite, the company that probably made the screen your parents used for slides or movies, now makes a complete line of home theater projection screens, including some models under $1,000 that include electric motors.  With those, you can hang the unobtrusive metal housing on the wall or ceiling and roll the screen down with the push of a button.  Home theater projectors aren’t for everyone — if you just watch the news and occasional situation comedies, they’re overkill.  But for sports, feature films and your own home videos and photos, the projection route can be impressive indeed.  And the projector manufacturers are now undergoing the same intense price competition that plasma and LCD screens experienced over the past couple of years, so real bargains should be forthcoming.  

With projector in place, you just need the tools to create some family media, and of course the shelves are chockablock with digital video and still cameras. For ease-of-use in the family room, take a look at the Kodak line of still cameras; Kodak started far behind in the digital camera race but has become a leader through their innovative EasyShare docks.  Cameras like their $400 V550, with 5.0 megapixels and 3x optical zoom (all the megapixels the average family really needs) come with a sleek docking station that not only recharges the camera but connects directly to your television’s A/V input for instant on-screen viewing.  More advanced versions of the docking station also include a built-in 4 x 6 inch printer—in short, you can basically skip the computer stage of digital photography and do everything in the family room.  (Of course if you also want to use your computer for more sophisticated digital editing and storage, the Kodak system works just like any other digital camera.) 

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