apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

The large screen was a freebie during a Circuit City promotion and I had to wait 5 months for the screen to finally be delivered (it was such a popular promotion, the contact at Optoma said she had boxes and boxes of rebate forms to handle by herself). But when you're getting something for free, you end being a whole lot more patient than if you had to pay for it.

The ceiling mounting option was fairly easy. I needed to purchase two weight bearing swag ceiling hooks, which are readily available at Home Depot in the ceiling lamp hardware section. Drilling two 1/3" holes using a power drill, I fastened the swag hooks, uniformly spaced the distance of the two preset loops on the Greyhawk II screen. The screen weight about 24lbs, so you want to make sure you drill into support beams if possible.

Currently the Optoma DLP projector is ceiling mounted using an affordable solution from eBay, but will require additional drilling through a wall dividing the living room from a walk-in closet, which will store the components and hide the wiring (except a single audio coaxial cable that will run over the Yamaha YSP-800 Digital Sound Projector). I'm dreading this last part, since it will require a bit of planning of how to attractively finish what amounts to a hole in the wall.

For now, all we can do is enjoy the huge picture (no audio, as I wait delivery of the coaxial cable from Monoprice) that dwarfs our 40" LCD. The screen has a 1.8 gain and none of the sparkling issues some users have mentioned; excellent viewing angle irregardless of whether sitting or standing. I'll have specifics about image performance after a few days of using the projector/screen combo, since I tired myself out installing everything last night. We can't wait to get everything fully setup for use in the coming days for a full test run using a PS3 for our first movie night screening. Now the question is which movie to screen....