I have to disagree a little bit with Tom regarding what he said about higher end displays and Pioneer’s Kuro plasma. The big reason I coveted (that’s right – I worked in the word o’ the day) a Kuro is because they did EVERYTHING really well. Yes, their black levels put them over the top, but they also had great colour accuracy, perfect gamma, the best anti-glare screen of any plasma AND excellent video processing!

I get what Tom is saying; if you’ve got $10,000 for a display, you’re probably not hooking it up to cheapo gear. But I have to say, I have my Kuro connected to my cable company’s DVR, and I don’t think that would be such a rare thing. I really appreciate that my Kuro can take the 1080i60 feed from my DVR, perform inverse telecine and deinterlacing processing, and give me a 1080p24 output shown at 72fps! You won’t find that same level of processing on lesser displays.

I agree that a $10,000 projector owner might be likely to also use a separate outboard video processor, but then again, if it has great processing built-in, even rich people can appreciate value 😉 If my Kuro had crappy processing, I would have had to spend a good chunk o’ change more on a separate processor, so I’m really glad it has great processing built-in! If it only had great black levels and nothing else, I wouldn’t have wanted it so much. It’s the fact that they were the “total package” that made the Kuro plasmas and projectors like JVC’s D-iLA lineup so coveted.

Upscaling and de-interlacing are the kind of things that are in the process of going away, like 480i analog signals over S-video connections. I agree with Tom that cutting-edge products shouldn’t bother with them if it causes any distraction from state-of-the-art advancement. On the other hand, if it’s cheap to implement due to an off-the-shelf IC, why not? Some rich guy might want to hook up a composite video signal from his trusty old Atari console for some upconverted 1080p Pong action! 😀

Then again, given that ‘most any pre-pro or AVR worth its salt can also perform upscaling and de-interlacing, so processing in the display could be considered redundant. Kinda like putting audio processing in a speaker…

Forgot to mention, really enjoyed the home theater planning segment. So true Tom about there being no way to plan for everything, but you can’t let that stop you from just going for it. I set my room up with equipment in a built-in rack on the side, and all the video connections at the front for a TV. Then I got a projector mounted in the rear! All the expensive cabling at the front totally abandoned inside the walls. I put way too many power outlets all around the walls, and I wired for 5.1 surround but later had to move the LS and RS forward when I added LBS and RRS for 7.1…lots of retrofitting of speaker wires. But hey, it’s a process and a hobby! Overcoming obstacles is all part of the fun!

If you’re lucky enough to have new construction or a full demo/reno where you will have access to the structure without drywall in place, I cannot stress enough:

conduit is your friend!

PVC or ABS tubing is cheap and oh so easy to run everywhere if you have the walls open. So I recommend running conduit absolutely every place where you even think you might possibly one day want to run a wire. Heck, run conduit into every single bay of your walls!

With the conduit back there, it’s super easy to pull any type of wire that you might need in the future or replace the wire that you have already run within the conduit.

One handy tip:

you can either leave a string inside every conduit run so that you can tie it to a cable and pull it through. Or, if you leave the conduit empty, you can tie a piece of string to a zip lock bag and stuff that into one end of the conduit. Then put a vacuum cleaner nozzle on the other end and suck the zip lock bag through the conduit run, pulling the string along with it.

Rob, that ziplock bag idea is pretty cool. Very MacGyver.

Yes, but you need to use an audiophile-quality ziplock bag to avoid problems with negative ionization. If anybody needs some, I’m selling them for $1,250 per dozen…. or 1/3 off if you order a full dozen.