Never underestimate the visual enhancement of ambient lighting for your home theater.  Watching movies in total darkness is a sure way to cause your audience eyestrain and fatigue viewers.  As the video from your movies goes bright, dark then bright again, your iris has to open and close to regulate your vision.  You can minimize this effect with a small amount of ambient lighting in your home theater.  With so many pricey options aimed at getting you to buy expensive sconces that may be stylish but beyond consideration for the average consumer.

Here is an alternative.  I took a cheap $10 lamp, the likes of which can be found at any department store and created the effect of some of the new “ambient lighting” plasma TVs by Philips as shown in the image above.  I wanted to create the same effect without the price.

The lamp itself is put together with sections that you have to screw together yourself.  When fully assembled the lamp sat too tall.  The light source was higher than the TV, too distracting for my purposes.  I needed the light to emanate from behind the TV; diffused so the source was not visible.  After cutting the AC line I was able to remove two sections of the lamp and then used electric tape and a few twists of the copper wire to put it back together.  Be careful to observe polarity.  The positive lead is marked with some writing or other print while the negative is just plain black.  As long as you have the like connected to like, you’re okay, it doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative. 

I placed the now short lamp in the middle, behind my TV and put in a high efficiency bulb that uses less wattage than incandescent.  The high efficiency lights not only use less energy, but they’re pretty close to full spectrum like a fluorescent light.  Full spectrum lights place less emphasis on any particular colour or colour temperature.  If you can find a lamp that is close as possible to 65,000 Kelvin all the better, but I wouldn’t go paying too much extra for it.

The end result is diffused ambient lighting behind my monitor, allowing me hours of viewing with a well rested iris that won’t put me to sleep.  Best of all I get the chic yet practical effect found in expensive HT monitors without spending the money.