Ahh, now we're talking
A general purpose $76 matte white screen, very slightly >1 gain, available a two minute drive from work, sounds like just what I need right now. There are just too many questions I need to answer about my own HT plans before getting anything more specialized... and I *really* don't feel like messing with painting anything right now.
Thanks !!
I learned something else interesting last night -- when you look at high gain screens, there are different types of reflective mechanisms available and so you need to figure out how & where your projector is going to be mounted before you can get the optimal screen.
There are "retro-reflective" screens where the light reflects back to the light source, eg. if you have a table top projector the light will be reflected back down towards the viewers. If you have a ceiling mount projector the brightest light will be reflected back up towards the ceiling. Many of the traditional high gain screens (eg. Da-Lite High Power) apparently operate this way.
The other kind is called "angular reflective", or "shiny" for us normal people. It works the way you would expect -- if the projector is mounted high then the brighest reflective light comes down towards the viewers, but if you have a table-top mount then the brightest reflected light is above the normal viewing position. Most of the silver screens (eg. the Vutec SilverStar) are like this.
I was going to start table top then eventually go to ceiling mount either when I finish the basement or when I feel like hanging a 6 foot pole down from the ceiling.
Matte screens don't care about this, of course, and I believe with moderate gain screens the viewing angle is wide enough that it only makes a bit of difference. Once you get up into the 2-ish gain or higher though this seems to be something you have to consider.
I still haven't figured out how the SilverStar gives such a wide apparent viewing angle along with high gain. I think the trick is that (a) the viewing angle seems to be a bit wider left-to-right than top-to-bottom, (b) the brightness drops off sufficiently smoothly that a typical viewer doesn't notice, and POSSIBLY (c) I read a number of posts indicating that hotspotting was often made more visible by colour shifts off axis, not just brightness variations, so maybe the SilverStar is better for off-axis colour balance ? Again, point c is just a guess, I hadn't read these posts when I was in front of the SilverStar.
