Actually, we just finished the room last week, and just finished fine turning everything the other night. Our first big screen adventure was watching the UGA/FLA game. My dawgs lost
We stayed pretty close to budget.
We had to build the room from the bottom up, we had a unfinished above the garage bonus room. No floor, insulation , nothing.
The room is roughly 14' x 20'.
plywood floor (self), around $500
insulation (self), $300
Can lights with dimmer installed (hire)$600
stairs $100 (self)
surround , projector cables wireing (self) $100
drywall installed $1500
carpet installed with pad (hire) $1200
Infocus SP4805, $1099, (this model is much cheaper now) but I did a lot of research at the time and for the money I feel this projector is hands down one of the better ones. One thing I was looking for was component video capabilites, and DLP. This fit the bill.
I got a ONKYO HT-S780 $550 Surround system with speakers. I purchased from Circuit City and the Sony rep was there and actually reconmended it over his own product. 7.1ch.
I found the xbox 360 ($450 bundle pack) gave me the best video quality on DVD, Both projector and xbox support 1080i, at least game play is 1080i at the moment, HD DVD is on the way, but the DVD quality right now is by far better then the progressive scan component DVD player I have. Sound through the Xbox is through digital Optic fiber, I recommend the cheap $16 panasonic optic cable over the $59 Xbox version. It gets the job done. I am a MAC guy so, no, this isnt a microsoft commercial, but it has worked for me, plus it has media center capabilities. Photos, music, video you can stream to your big screen.
Screen is a panoview grey wolf pull down, $189
It fits perfect for this room , it is 8' wide. any bigger for this room wouldnt work. the screen has embedded crystals built into it, so i can leave the projector at low bulb light and still recieve an awesome picture.
That is the breakdown in a nut shell yeah we went a little over budget but not much, many people that have existing rooms can by far get away much cheaper.
$6588 total roughly. i feel this is pretty good considering there was nothing there. a lot of blood, sweet, and tears went into it. I recommend doing your homework well before taking on such a project. Before I drove the first nail, I made sure everything was going to work together, I bought all the equipment first, hooked it all up, made sure everything worked together, took notes on wireing procedures. Yes I could of maybe saved some money if i would of waited after the room was closer to completed before buying everything because the prices have come down quite a bit since i started this project, but once the walls are up and the wireing is done, you really need to have all the details worked out if you have the sort of space that allows you to run the wireing through the walls. Research Research Research, do your homework. I am not a guru by any means, but i certianly learned a lot more about everything then i did before i started. you can easily get riped off by any salesman if you dont know your stuff. a salesman told me infocus projectors sucked, but i have to say from experience, he is wrong and he was pushing a 7,000 projector. I have seen $5000 and up projectors that dont hold water to the quality of picture the infocus has. Yes it does not have all the bells and whisles, but who really needs them, once you have everything dailed in , how offen are you going to change it? and it pretty much works out of the box.
Thats my 2 cents.