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1) I want a screen that will fill the wall left to right. I remeasured my wall and it was just under 11 feet at 127 inches. That's before double drywall and some insulation on the concrete wall. That leaves about 123 inches for screen and frame.


Though some people prefer it I see no reason to sacrifice image height (constant image height (CIH)) of a native 1.78/1.85:1 or 1.33:1 picture to fit it on a 2.35/2.40:1 screen either by zooming the picture or using an anamorphic lens unless you are restricted by the height of the screen you can use. I chose to buy the widest screen I could fit on my wall which also turned out to be highest 1.78:1 or 16x9 I could use. That way I have the best of all worlds IMO by having the biggest image I can possibly have in any native format displayed the way it was produced.

Although when displaying 2.35/2.40:1 images I have horizontal “black bars” I can shift the image down to the bottom of my screen so that there is only one bar at the top and cover that area with DIY masking thus turning my 1.78:1 screen into a 2.35 or 2.40 screen. For 1.33:1 (4x3) I have vertical bars on each side of the screen but since this is typically TV (older) fare I don’t even bother masking it.

If you plan on only or mainly watching 2.35/2.40:1 movies then having a higher screen may not matter. However, if you plan on also watching a lot of 1.78/1.85:1 movies or 16x9 HDTV or video and computer games or 4x3 TV shows then IMO a 1.78:1 screen is the way to go especially since you already plan to go AT which means your speaker will fit behind it.

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5) I would need an anamorphic lens for a projector that can display 2.40:1, that starts out in price at $2000. I thought that the Panasonic PTAE4000U didn't need this lens, but from searching the internet the salesperson couldn't determine that while I was there. He said 2.40:1 is a more popular size today than 2.35:1

The PTAE4000 uses memorized zoom settings to scale an image to the screen size. This works well but does sacrifice image brightness when scaling from the native 16x9 resolution to any other resolution. Note that it also maintains the original image ratio so a 1.78:1 image displayed on a 2.40 screen will sill be 1.78 just much smaller in height and with “black” bars on the sides. An anamorphic lens will not sacrifice brightness and will stretch the image to fit the width of the screen but the height will still be smaller. Almost if not any projector can be manually zoomed in and out to fit any image to any size screen up to the limit of the screens width or height depending on the resolution of the image. The new Epson may also have the memorized presets now but I’m not sure.


3M80 2M22 6QS8 2M2 1EP500 Sony BDP-S590 Panny-7000 Onkyo-3007 Carada-134 Xbox Buttkicker AS-EQ1