Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Tell me about... screens

Most of the simple screens (eg. Parkland) do not seem to be available in Canada without a real fight. On avsforum the last few days there has been a lot of traffic about a cabinet laminate ("Designer White") from Wilsonart which seems to perform pretty well -- first few comparisons seem to put it a bit ahead of the Parkland plastic sheets and it is available in 5x10 foot sheets for bigger screens.

I hunted around to find Wilsonart dealers in Canada -- the only one who sold sheets (rather than cabinets with the laminate glued on) was Rona Lansing, sort of a local version of Home Depot. Hit two stores; they had never heard of Wilsonart but they sold lots of Formica. I picked up a Matte White formica sheet for about $35 and am about to fire it up now. It is a bit shiny for my liking (less so than melamine-clad MDF though) and hopefully has enough texture that the hotspotting won't be too bad.

<insert pause to set up the laminate and watch a few movies>

After a couple of hours I am pretty happy with this. No visible hotspotting, and no obvious colour push. I don't have any good samples to compare with right now so I am going by memory, but will try to get some comparisons done over the weekend. Definitely less shiny and less hotspotting than the HD painted masonite 2x4 I started with. More gain and much sharper image than the synthetic dropcloth I was using to determine ideal screen size.

At 92" or 106" diagonal it's still not sufficiently bright to run the Z4 in "Pure Cinema" (low lamp, no auto iris) but in Creative Cinema it looks mighty fine. I am really starting to get a hankering for a 2.35 setup with one of those stretchy lenses, although not sure what to do about the fact that all of my 2.35 movies seem to have 1.85 menus.

Randy was right about how good a matte white screen can look. It's quite surprising.

EDIT -- in an earlier post I think I said the upscaling on the Sanyo was not good. My current understanding is that the de-interlacing is not so good but the upscaling (say from 480p to 720p) is fine, so maybe I get to stay with the Pioneer for a while.