RE: Do you really need a projector screen?

["Andy Bovingdon" <bov@xxxxxxx>]

I can beat that, I bought a 5 year old Barco that retailed for over
12k for just over 1k. Gives a fantastic picture and probably has
about 5 years more life in it. If you have the room a CRT is by
far the cheapest way to get into projection, most are too big
to appeal to people and as such are real cheap. For 3-5 k
you can get a fairly top of the line unit that will beat any DLP
or LCD unit on resolution and contrast. The only down side
is brightness - you need a dark room - like a real cinema.

On the topic of screens. I did many side by side checks and
found that while a painted wall was ok a decent screen won
hands down. Unfortunately most of the cheaper screens
simply were not that good and the comparison between them
and wall was far less obvious. In the end I spent the same
on the screen as I did on the projector and bought an entry
level Stewart screen. Draper screens were almost as good
as were DaLite. But they did not quite fit my needs.

With screens you work on the amount of light that is reflected
back - the gain. For lower light CRT's you go for a higher gain,
although go too high and you can end up with image problems
where light wavelengths cause colour shifts as you move off
center. You can also get twinkles where individual reflective
bits shine out.

That said, for an LCD or DLP projector the units really throw
out too much light for cinema use, meaning that the contrast
suffers and blacks turn out to be a dirty gray colour. They are
fine for PowerPoint presentations in a bright meeting room
though. To counter this many of the screen makers have
released gray screens (Stewart have GreyHawk and FireHawk)
which improves the contrast and returns the blacks to the
correct level. Having seen one of these screens in action
I can honestly say it changed my opinion of DLP projection.

But they do cost money and are worth saving for. But to start
off with I would suggest going and checking out the screens
forum on www.avsforum.com and ask some questions,
there are people on their that swear by home made screens
and you can even get paint that gives the right sorts of gain.
One suggestion is to make a basic wooden frame and to
stretch either artist canvas or the white side of blackout
fabric over it. Blackout fabric gives a very uniform screen
that has the right granularity and reflective qualities. It also
does not absorb any light like some other materials can.

Best of luck.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark McCall [mailto:mark@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 09 October 2002 08:46
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Do you really need a projector screen?
>
>
> > Now there's two words I never thought I'd see in the same
sentence -
> "cheap"
> > and "CRT Projector"
> > (Okay, _three_ words then) :-)
>
> It's a Seleco 320+ which is very much an "entry level"
projector.  RRP was
> 3.5K, got it for 2.75K.
>
> M.
>
>
>
>
>
> http://www.automatedhome.co.uk
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