Wacky Products for Home Theatre Buffs

Using an LCD projector for your home theatre can be great, but the downside is that you are often projecting on a crummy wall or buying an expensive screen. Vogel, a Dutch company, has a do-it-yourself solution where you paint a screen on your wall. It's called Mighty Brighty Projection Screen Paint, and the entire painting kit comes in a neat little box. All you do is measure the area to paint, pick up your brush, and paint it on.

The paint is pre-mixed, and you brush it on in layers—a basecoat followed by a topcoat. The thickness of the topcoat is formulated based on the amount of light you typically use in the room.

An enhanced version of the kit includes a black magnetic border that you can use to demarcate the screen and then remove when you're done watching. And an even more enhanced version makes the paint invisible when nothing is being projected. The home theatre's answer to paint by numbers.

Finding the right décor for your home theatre is always a problem, but the evo system from Vantage Point has an interesting solution. It's a modular mounting system for hanging all of your high tech gear—TV, office equipment, stereo, or gaming gear—and for managing all of the wires and cables. The modular aluminum frames are available in three finishes and can be expanded to multiple configurations. The panels are made of wood and available in five finishes. The whole frame extends four inches from the wall, leaving you room to run your cables. The system can be mounted on any wall, even concrete or masonry. Accessories like glass shelving and speaker mounts are available. If your décor is country rustic, you might not go for it, but for most modern home designs it's going to look great and hold whatever you can toss at it. (The company says it will even let you mount a DLP TV.)