As home entertainment equipment gets cheaper and the quality gets better each year, more and more people are starting to wonder about setting up their own home cinema system. So what are the advantages and disadvantages of a home cinema compared to just going to the real cinema?

Well, lets start with price. Sure, going to the cinema can be expensive, especially if you buy popcorn and hotdogs every time, but its nothing compared to the cost of buying a home cinema system. For the price all the equipment you need, even though the price is going down, you could still go to the cinema every week for years and thats before you consider the cost of buying or renting the films!

However, the fact that you can buy and rent films is a big upside of having a good home entertainment system. When you go to the cinema, your choices are limited to what theyve got with a home cinema, combined with the unique power of the Internet to locate almost any DVD in existence; your choices are almost unlimited.

Yes, you have to make your own film food, but at least its cheap, and you can have as much as you want. You also dont have to put up with other people eating and talking through the film but if you want to pause it and answer your phone then at home you can.

Really, its a trade-off, even once you take price out of the equation: youre never going to get a screen as big and a sound system as good as the one in the cinema, but what you lose in quality you make up for in control. Besides, many movie buffs say that although the picture may be smaller, they believe that the overall quality of the film is higher when they configure their own equipment, instead of leaving it to the underpaid teenagers who staff the projectors in modern cinemas.