"Home Theater Lighting Design"



The relevance or significance of home theater lighting is most apparent when faced with contrast issues, picture resolution, or otherwise the 'throw distance' concept of lighting.

Before looking at the different options available in home theater lighting, it is worthwhile to advert to how lighting affects picture quality. Starting with contrast resolution, picture quality is dependant on the effective contrast attained between the picture on the screen and the general or ambient light in the room.

Ambient light is best kept at minimum to achieve better contrast and high definition pictures. While this obviously means eliminating ambient light, the importance of lighting in determining the degree of ambient light is high.

Home theater lighting should be examined within the framework of light and its attributes. With light traveling in straight lines, a source of light is capable of issuing light beams in every direction.

These light beams, if unguided and uncontrolled, travel in every direction and in turn get reflected back from smooth or even surfaces. Thus we not only have light emanating from a light source, but also reflected light. These factors are however capable of being controlled and guided or otherwise limited through appropriate lighting. To start with, controlling the watt power effectively controls the luminous intensity of the lighting, while, the shape and design of the lamp can effectively guide light upwards, backwards or sideways.

This is effective in insulating areas from light by calculating the 'throw distance' of the light beams controlled using principles of refraction of light. Manipulating throw distance, lighting devices can determine the span or area and direction where lighting is provided with 'short throw' lighting up larger areas within a smaller radius of the lamp source, and 'long throw' lighting up smaller areas within a bigger radius of the lamp source. This also has implications on the effective reflected light, otherwise known as ambient light.

Current trends in lighting not only provide home theater lighting remote controls to adjust the direction and span of the light beams, but it also assists in remotely controlling or otherwise adjusting the intensity or luminosity of the light emanating from the home theater lighting.