This is my first bigscreen purchase and my head is spinning for the choices, any help you can give is greatly appreciated!
THE SETUP
The budget: $2000 or so
The Room: Kinda small but built for a old school deep big screen. It is a 4x10 Tv nook that sits on the oposite side of the room from the couch. The room is 18 feet long total. So thats about 13 feet between couch and screen.
The inputs: 2 Tivos being fed by comcast digital. (HD receiver when all is said and done)
THE GOAL
Get as much screen in the room as I can reasonablely make look good
Big Questions:
Which TV and which retailer? Since my primary inputs will be from a (kind of) MPEG2 source (tivos) and I'll be about 13 feet away I don't want to over shoot the screen size. I'm thinking 55 or 57 will be acceptable.
Since the room's tv nook has 4 feet of depth and 10 feet of length. I figure forgo the fancy thin tvs and stick with rear projection.
I have been looking at pac-2000 and 1800nicebuy. Any experience or suggestions?
Little questions:
Does windows CE and a ethernet jack really add anything? I have wired ethernet running to both tivos and wouldn't mind having a way to play divx/mpeg2 sans a xbox.
How do you not get screwed on shipping? Is "front threshold" good enough or should I find a etailer that will set it up for me?
Thank you for any help or corrections in my assumptions!