Home cinema

Home cinema, also called home theater, seeks to reproduce cinema quality video and audio in the home. The video aspect usually involves a large-screen and/or high definition television or a projection system with movie screen to project the image on. Quality audio reproduction is usually achieved with a high fidelity surround sound system.

Technically, a home cinema could be as basic as a simple arrangement of a television, VCR, and a set of speakers. It is therefore difficult to specify exactly what distinguishes a "home cinema" from a "television and stereo". Most people in the consumer electronics industry would agree that a "home theater" is really the integration of a relatively high-quality video source with multi-channel electronics and speakers. Even if households have the system set up for home cinema it is common only to use the speakers integrated within the television rather than to play the sound through the surround sound system. This is because surround sound loses its impact with material which is not recorded in a way suitable for surround sound. Films, drama and sport tend to be optimised for surround sound whereas news and daytime TV provide no particular advantage.
History
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1950s and 1960s home movies

A home theater with video projector mounted in a box on the ceiling.In the 1950s, home movies became popular in the United States and elsewhere as Kodak 8 mm film (Pathé 9.5 mm in France) and camera and projector equipment became affordable. Projected with a small, portable movie projector onto a portable screen, often without sound, this system became the first practical home theater. They were generally used to show home movies of family travels and celebrations but also doubled as a means of showing private stag films. Dedicated home cinemas were called screening rooms at the time and were outfitted with 16 mm or even 35 mm projectors for showing commercial films. These were found almost exclusively in the homes of the very wealthy, especially those in the movie industry.

Portable home cinemas improved over time with color film, Kodak Super 8 mm film film cartridges, and monaural sound but remained awkward and somewhat expensive. The rise of home video in the late 1970s almost completely killed the consumer market for 8 mm film cameras and projectors, as VCRs connected to ordinary televisions provided a simpler and more flexible substitute.
1980s home cinema
The development of multi-channel audio systems and laserdisc in the 1980s created a new paradigm for home cinema. The first public demonstration of this integration occurred in 1982 at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Illinois. Peter Tribeman of NAD (USA) organized and presented a demonstration made possible by the collaborative effort of several companies who contributed their technologies to demonstrate what a home cinema would "look and sound" like.

Over the course of three days, retailers, manufacturers, and members of the consumer electronics press were exposed to the first "home like" experience of combining a high quality video source with multi-channel sound. That one demonstration is credited with being the impetus for developing what is now a multi-billion dollar business.

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1990s home cinema
In the late 1990s, the development of DVD, 5-channel audio, and high-quality video projectors that provide a cinema experience at a price that rivals a big-screen HDTVs sparked a new wave of home cinema interest.

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