People's home are becoming increasingly high-tech as prices of new gadgetry falls.

People's home are becoming increasingly high-tech as prices of new gadgetry falls.

The rise in the quality and affordability of home theatre systems is one of the reasons given for the decline of box office attendance. If you can watch what you want in the privacy of your own home, then there's not much point braving the crowds only to find yourself sitting behind someone with a Marge Simpson hairdo.

In selecting your own private screen, there are a few options.

Plasma screens are considered better quality than LCD screens, depending on the brand, once you start getting into the larger sizes. LCD pixels can also die or become locked up. And the price of plasmas has been plummeting. You can buy a 42-inch Hundai for around $3000. Even a 42-inch Sony is just $4500.

But as the prices have been dropping, the technology has been evolving. Rear-projection televisions have improved in leaps and bounds. And they are not as expensive as the traditional bulkier screens. A Samsung 43-inch is around $2000.

If you're looking for real home theatre, you'll probably want a larger screen. A 62-inch rear projection Toshiba is about $8000.

Kevin Andreassend, managing director of Ice AV, says that if you want better value for money, choose a frontal projection unit.

Projectors have traditionally not been the best quality. But Adreassend says that has now changed.

"If you use a projector and you want to get an image that you cannot criticise or fault, you have to put it into a dark room.

"Use that same projector with one of our screens and you can actually use that projector in a fully lit room and you'll get an image that you cannot fault."

The screens are concave, so they reject light from the centre of the curvature. There is no reflection or glare.

The screens range from 40 inches diagonal up to 103 inches diagonal (2.3m). With the larger screens, you would probably need a dedicated room because they need to be a reasonable distance from the projector.

But Andreassend says this is not the trend.

"People want to have entertainment, no matter what it is, but they want to have it in a normal type of environment, rather than having a dedicated room. Of course those who have the budget or the spare room and those sorts of things can obviously afford the luxury of I guess what you'd call a dedicated home theatre room."

To put content on that big screen requires a powerful projector. They vary in quality and price from $1500 to $48,000 with most less than $6000. As with most products, there is less difference in quality once the price reaches a certain point. The more expensive projectors may provide a larger image with better quality, but you will need extra depth of space to create that larger image.