Thanks for everyone for their advice. Here is an update and answers to some of your questions. The room is a open plan kitchen / diner / living room and unfortunately my girlfriend isn't about to let me paint it. I am considering getting a fairly standard matt white screen with gain of 1. This is partly due to cost and availability of grey screens. I am hoping that despite the white walls good light control may suffice. I also intend to find a couple of black drapes that i will hook up for serious watching. This is somewhat contrary to everyone's advice so far so feel free to scorn me if i'm mad and i will reconsider. (Also, is there any different advice for playing video games or does the same apply?) I also intend to get a 120"-130" further to AV_Integrated's advice. The seating area would end up being right at the edge of the space with a 150" screen. I also thought that reducing the size should increase the brightness and hence reduce the afore-mentioned problems. Finally I plan to get the projector from dviexpress.com as they are the only place that appear do the Epson Powerlite Home 1080 UB projector for europe. Any advice about this also gratefully received. FYI, I probably be mounting on the ceiling.

I just bought the PowerLite Home Cinema 1080 UB (and it's great), but I can't change the aspect ratio when I'm looking at non-HD TV channels. Apparently if the sources is HDMI (which it is) then it will only use 16:9 regardless of what's on the screen. Do all projectors have this limited functionality or is it just Epson? Since there's only a handful of HDTV stations and I want to watch old movies or non-HD TV in the proper proportions, I'd like to be able to change the aspect ratio to what's appropriate. If it's just Epson, I'll return the projector and start my hunt over, but if all HD-capable projectors do this, then I was thinking of connecting my DVR (with built-in cable cards) to the projector with a second cable (composite or something) and switching the source when I'm watching regular TV. I think I'm a minority in terms of what I'm using the projector for (TV/DVR and DVD as opposed to gaming), but I'm curious as to whether anybody out there has some experience with this issue. Thanks!