For quite a long time those of us with projectors managed quite happily with Laser Disc and then DVD and sat at 2X the base width of the screen. If it was a projector screen then that meant a 7 or 8ft wide image. This was when projectors were either SD or 1280x720. That said, a decent home cinema projector in the late 90's early 2000's was £5000+

A lot has changed in the greater part of two decades, and not always for the better. It is still possible to get decent results from SD DVD, and the technology to do that has become much cheaper. At the same time the entry-level price for gear has plummeted, and along with it so many corners have been cut to achieve the stupidly-low prices of the base models that I'm amazed all the TV manufacturers haven't already gone bust.

SD still holds up pretty well on decent 1080p projectors, even those available for around £1000. Throw £500 at a really good Blu-ray player from Oppo, Panasonic or Cambridge Audio (Oppo clones) and you're about as well placed as you can be for extracting the most from SD DVD to be displayed at 1080p.

There used to be options to add outboard scalers between the source(s) and the display for £500 to £1000. DVDO and Lumagen were perhaps two of the best known in this niche field. That's no longer an option now though. Lumagen is still in the market but has gone very high-end. DVDO is focusing on other products. Their legacy products are still available though in the used market. As long as you don't need 3D support or ARC features then even the product from 10 years ago makes a substantial improvement to the a midrange TV or budget-ish projector system.

What any scaler or high-end BD player can't overcome though is the technical limitations of the cheap LCD screens used in entry-level LED TVs. They just don't refresh fast enough to display motion without smear or in some cases judder. There are little set-up tricks that can be used to minimise the worst of the in-built TV processing and maybe improve the colour rendition a bit, but in the end it really is a case of 'you get what you pay for'.

Not sure about the relevance of all of that but what you have not mentioned is that not all DVDs are created equal. There is now plenty of rubbish on sale with really poor source material and/or recording quality. If you have one of those no amount of expensive technology will make it look good (or often even watchable). On the other hand a really good DVD may look fine even with relatively cheap players and TVs.

This is true I have some older DVD's that are non-anamorphic such as the original Star Wars trilogy they are formatted in a 4:3 aspect picture with black bars top and bottom rather than a proper 16.9 so without zooming in you get a small picture with black borders on all four sides. Unfortunately apart from my CAV LaserDisc's it the best official release I have available.

Thanks or all the info (and insults!) , Managed to tweak the settings on my blu ray recorder and dvds look a lot better now.

My overriding feeling is that while your stated viewing distance is too close, u should still get a useable, acceptable sd DVD result.
My closest example I have seen is freinds with a tiny house, and a tiny room into which they installed a massive 65in LCD (Samsung, full HD). Connected to a old DVD player and Sky HD box. Their viewing distance is too small, and while in modern DVD (sd quality) u can see some imperfections, the overal result is still very acceptable.

got a bit used to my tv now. Really nice picture but sound is awful. There does seem a lot of sibilance anyway with tv sound. Even with the soundbar i can hear sibilance. Sounds awful when bbc trailers are on , all can hear is hissing. Female voices are sometimes bad too. Some programmes are worse than others.