Rear- and Front-Projection
Front-projection brings the big-screen, cinema experience into your home - not just for TV and DVDs, but also for games and slide shows. Rear-projection is something else altogether, but the effect is comparable.
Rear-projection TVs
If you want a very large TV indeed, you might consider a rear-projection TV. It sounds like some kind of cinema, but is nothing of the sort. Instead the image is projected within the relatively deep box of the TV onto thousands of tiny mirrors, and then reflected back onto the screen. This works well for very large screen sizes, from 44" upwards. Various technologies are used, including CRT (the technology permits much thinner housing than normal CRT TVs) and LCD, as well as DLP (digital light processing) and LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon). Rear-projection TVs will be able to take High Definition (HD) images, but their picture quality is generally less good than that of either LCD or plasma TVs. Also, the housing is about 2 ft (60 cm) deep, and heavy, so cannot be wall-mounted. The advantages of rear-projection TVs, however, are firstly their size and secondly their price: you get a lot of TV for your money.
Front-projection systems
You can go one stage further, and use a projector that throws the image across a room onto a screen of up to 300" - genuinely like the cinema. (This experience is often referred to as 'home theatre'.) Such systems tend to be expensive, and require a darkened room and - because of viewing habits - are probably better suited to watching DVDs. However, front-projection systems can also show TV programmes, if connected to a TV tuner of some kind - or video games, if connected to a games console.
