Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Guvante | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Guvante

Multi use rooms require TVs.

Projectors cannot handle ambient light without being a fire hazard.

View on HN

>Multi use rooms require TVs

That seems an overstatement. I now have one in my entire house (don't have kids).

There's a fairly large TV panel on one wall in basically a sitting room. Otherwise I just use a computer. A relative basically has TVs in every room. I guess it maybe made sense when he was rebuilding anyway but it still seems excessive to me who might sit down to watch a movie or show but doesn't have live TV.

But, then, I don't have AC either in Massachusetts.

I was responding to projectors...

But you also seem to also be saying that a lot of rooms require TVs.

Only transitively. The claim was that if you have a “multi use room”, as opposed to a dedicated tv/movie room, you need a TV instead of a projector.

I apparently didn't get the intent that TV=panel. Fair enough. But I do know people who put a TV in pretty much every room and I don't know if a projector is a great solution at this point even for a dedicated room given that you can get 75" (or larger) panels.

I will say that when all sorts of stuff got pulled out of my house for smoke damage mitigation, I also made the conscious decision to just not put back a lot of the things/wiring that I really wasn't using to any degree. A lot has changed (both with respect to technology and myself) to the point where it really didn't make sense to put things back like they were.

If you are rich you have single-use rooms. Hell, even I have a sleeping room, a cat room and a hacking room. It's not that expensive. The cat room doubles as a mini-cinema.

Ambient light is dealt with having nice thick blackout drapes.

This is not some rocket science, it was done for like a hundred years.

edit: actually in my former apartment I just bought a roll-down projector screen that completely covered the window. pull down - zero ambient light even in full sunshine.

Lots of people (even exceptionally wealthy ones) don't want to always have to go to the theater room to go watch something. Lots of people like having the TV on in the same way one might think about having a radio on, its not necessarily a thing they're exclusively focused on.

Take a look at this house:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5619-Walnut-Hill-Ln-Dalla...?

Sure, it has a theater room with probably an incredible projector I'd imagine. It also has a bar with a big TV behind it. It also has a game room with several TVs mounted on the walls. In both of those situations, you wouldn't really want a projection setup. A brighter TV wins out in the end.

I've seen lots of TVs mounted in outdoor living room/kitchen arrangements. They're common to find in living rooms even for people who have separate theater rooms. I've seen them mounted in garages. TVs have uses other than just pure cinematic experiences. And I say that as someone who has personally pushed TV watching to an exclusive space in my home and made a point to not have TVs everywhere. Other people like different things.

A relative likes to have TV on as ambient background. Drives me a bit crazy but, hey, I'm a guest. Also used to drive me nuts when I was on group trips with a roommate and their first reaction on entering a room was to turn the TV on.

My point was it isn't as simple as projectors are better.

To be clear I only know this because I was totally going to swap to a projector once I bought a place only to realize they don't work well during the day.

> If you are rich you have single-use rooms.

Yes, you might, but you can also have normal multi-use rooms. It's not like being rich somehow makes a 'standard' living room configuration with TV and couch gauche. The likely main difference is the couch is going to be way bigger and the TV is probably 100" inches.

Theater/cinema rooms are a very different experience (lights off, dedicated to watching the thing) compared to a standard lights on TV experience. Two different purposes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com