...quite reasonable at $1500 to $2000.
Nah... Too rich for my blood. I went with a nice screen last time. Cost me a bit of dollars despite being more economical than a lot of other options. It was out-done by the casual DIYer. I have seen screens costing 20% of what I paid that were just as good because they were DIY. I am going to be building the whole false wall and the whole thing will be AT, so it will be a DIY screen for me. I want it to look clean from edge to edge. Once you add in a motorized masking system (which is super cool) it ends up adding "depth" to the front of the clean screen wall.
Maybe I could just create a few additional AT panels (in black of course) and stick them up over top of the screen areas that I want to mask. They wouldn't be "clean" since they would sit on top of the wall/screen, but they would be a lot cheaper than some motorized setup.
I am also blessed with a system that does "inky blacks" so maybe the masking won't even be a problem. That is one of the really nice things about getting away from LCD technology.
The "best of both worlds" from a flexibility point of view would seem to be the huge 1.78:1 screen, but as mentioned already, there is a proven psychological effect of a movie being "less impressive" than a TV show with a 1.78:1 screen since the projected amount of image is reduced.
Crap, keep voting people. I've read a ton over at AVS and there seems to be no right/wrong way depending on who you talk to. Then again, hearing about people making "sleds" to move their speakers around is a bit excessive.
