Today's HDTVs VS The Cinema Screen

These are not really comparable and for many reasons. One of the largest has to be that the content you see at the cinema is no where near the quality of what you get at home via a set top box and blu-ray. The resolution, bit rate, color bit depth ect is all substantially higher then what you get at home.

That's the content, but I think you're more referring to HDTVs versus DCI digital projectors. This is also similar to what I was talking about before regarding content. These projectors are built for a completely different purpose. These projectors don't usually have the luxury to reach on/off contrast ratios like most HDTVs and other displays do. A lot of that has to do with how bright they are/have to be. That's really the only negative caveat about DCI projectors. The rest of the issues most people complain about when at a local cinema has to do with how the projector has been setup or calibrated. This is usually due to poor management. In all other areas I think that digital projection in general is vastly superior to any HDTV that I've seen. These DCI cinema projectors in general will give much better picture quality then any HDTV regarding color accuracy, larger color space, sharpness/resolution, native motion, motion handling of the content, and gamma.

That's regarding DCI projectors, now if we were to talk about non commercial home theater projectors there are TONS that trounce the PQ of 99.99999% of all HDTVs. They can be expensive though. To this day the only HDTV that I would own over a projector would be one of Pioneers latest generation Kuros. There are size limits to those panels though. 60" isn't very large compared to todays HDTVs and very very small when compared to a normal image size coming from a projector. There are a bunch of single chip DLP projectors out there under $10000 that I think outperform every HDTV currently being made today.

I think most people who frequent this subforum would agree with me. My father owns a ~60" Sharp Aquos LED LCD HDTV and my brother owns one of the more expensive 50" plasmas from Panasonic, in my opinion none of them come close to overall image quality to any one of my three projectors; the Marantz VP-11S1, NuVision ProVu P2, and Planar PD8150.

Nope. Check out this PDF:

http://dcimovies.com/specification/DCI_DCSS_v12_with_errata_2012-1010.pdf

That explains the nature of DCI and DCI compliant products.

Video is compressed 4K using JPEG 2000. It's 12bit color not 8 bit and doesn't conform to REC709. It uses the larger DCI color space. It's also 24.000 fps unlike what we get at home which is 24/1.001 (23.976).

Apart from the technical specs, in my opinion, a good home theater front projection system with a good Blu-ray is visually quite satisfactory in comparison to the commercial cinema. The home front projection screen image is usually MUCH larger than an HDTV, and its "look" is much more like the cinema. Its light is reflected like the cinema, and its brightness is often similar to the cinema -- not the often over-bright HDTV.

It depends on the model. If you were thinking about spending less than $2500 then I think you'll be a little disappointed. Generally as you move past the mid priced projectors the image quality goes up a pretty decent step as they start to put quality parts (optics for example) in them. Other refinements such as color management, better processing, smarter dynamic irises ect. become feasible given the budget these projectors are given. There is plenty of information on this forum. Depending on where your budget stands there are three subforums you can look at.

At that price point you could probably find a used, b-stock, or refurbished JVC DLA-X3 or X30. Though, I'm not sure what that market looks like outside of the US. They seem to be in abundance here as so many people have them and upgrade to JVCs newest model each year. That would be your best in my opinion for a projector in that price range. You'd be surprised how much nicer they are compared to the vast majority of projectors at that price and lower. If you were willing to spend more there are a lot of nice DLP models you could look at that, in my opinion, are much better than a projector from JVC. But if your budget is tight stick with a low end JVC and you should be pretty content with the image quality they give. Most will tell you its superior to any HDTV being made this year.