About to buy a 50" Toshiba Rear Projection set and am starting to get doubts that I have enough room for it. Not literally the set itself, but am I going to be able to sit far enough back to get a crisp picture.

At the moment I'm about two metres back and I like my sofa where it is. If I'm sitting that close to a 50" screen is the picture going to be sharp enough?

How far back do you all sit to get the most of your big screens?

I would think that the picture will look rather grainy on a 50" beast, sat only 2 metres away.
go into a local store and stand at the same distance.

[lynx]

Have a look here . Someone else raised similar concerns.

The recommended viewing distance for PAL TV is between 3.5 to 5 times screen diagonal.

For example; my viewing distance is 2.7m for my small 28" 16:9 PAL Plus (575 scan lines) CRT television. This is the absolute minimum for me to see a homogeneous picture.

Also see viewing distance and home cinema viewing distance , very informative.

Regards
Sly Fox

[nfordenfield]

Be your own judge, most CRT projector users are sitting 1.5 times the screen width away, other wise just get a portable tv and hold it arms length.

Do you sit this far away from your computer monitor? - NO.

Hope this helps

Nathan

The pictures from these rear projection tv's really look awful to me.
You would be better of buying the panny ae100 or similar projector with drop down screen and keep your current tele if its widescreen, if not buy a cheap widescreen. Also you have the problem with screen burn with rear project, not nice with all the crap logos these days on sky.

[lynx]

Originally posted by nfordenfield

Do you sit this far away from your computer monitor? - NO

This is not a valid comparison.How many computer monitors have you seen that are rp's ? How many exist ? They are specificaly designed for close proximity viewing, rptv's are not.

Computer monitors can handle higher resolution and display progressive, not interlaced. This gives you a far better picture than regular TV-monitors, provided the source is appropriate.

RPTV's are nothing else than TV's that project the picture over a mirror onto a larger screen. This does not result in a better picture quality, just a bigger picture, e.g. bigger image pixels etc.

Projected pictures over a projector can be viewed at a distance of 2 time picture width. This is not valid for TV's !

Read again !

Some people just tend to compare apples with oranges