Re: 9000000 inches....yawn

"Most truly great films also do not need to compensate by being big and flashy and loud. They are equally great at any scale."

It has nothing to do with being flashy and loud, it has to do with immersion and with seeing the film as the director intended.

How can you expect to be really involved in Citizen Kane if your view is 20% movie and 80% lamp, couch, painting on the wall, cat, floor with a bunch of crap on it, some wires, etc? How can you expect to see with a 20 degree FOV the detail the director intended you to see with a 60 degree FOV?

Then there's color quality and dynamic range - trust me, this makes a huge difference. If you've got some POS 32" TV, chances are that black and white movies are actually blue and purple and red and gray and purple and red and blue movies. Chances are that you can't see the two main characters' silhouettes lurking through the shadows because the silhouettes get rendered the same color as the shadows.

And you say you don't need 'loud' - well, what's loud? You need high quality, 'loud' audio to have the correct dynamic range between a door slamming and a whisper. You don't have to have Michael Bay style firefights to justify - to require - an excellent sound system with 90+db of dynamic range. The ability to hear a yelling match at the same quality and *understandability* as a passionate whisper is essential to those truly great films, and crappy hardware will *not* reproduce it effectively.

Now, you don't need to go out and spend $10,000 on a home theater, but you -do- need to acknowledge that, just as there's more to film than big explosions, there's more to high quality portrayal of film than big explosions.

Look at it this way: The great directors of our time did not spend tens of thousands of hours choosing their shots and angles so that you could see them in a postage stamp window. The best cinematographers did not learn the intricacies of bringing the right color and shade to the screen so you could fail to see half of it on some POS Westinghouse LCD with a 2:1 contrast ratio. The best audio engineers and musicians didn't hone their crafts and extract their every last bit of skill and ability so people could listen on a couple of two-inch TV speakers with the frequency range of an iPad.

For someone who's so self-righteous about quality film and crappy generic mainstream, you seem to know remarkably little about how film actually works. See some of those truly great films the way they were meant to be seen. You might end up wanting to see some of them again, too.