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

Yep, that must look great. All you need is the martial theme from "Thunderbirds" as the screen comes down

I definitely don't need higher gain for image brightness in a dark room (the Sanyo is rated 1000 lumens at full power, 300-ish at best PQ), it's just that the viewing area is wide open on two sides, one of them to sunsets, so sometimes the ambient light level is going to be pretty high.

Then again, I guess most of the movie watching will be in those long cold winters when it gets dark at 4:30 and I get home from work at 7:30

Hmmm... the DIY screens are getting more and more interesting. The latest is a thing called "Black Flame Light Fusion" -- looks like the Light Fusion design tweaked to (a) work better in high ambient light, and (b) work pretty well without a mirror.

The screen shots are alarmingly good. Nice, typical daytime shots of living rooms with windows open, daylight streaming in and lights on... with this blazing projector image in the middle of the wall, from run-of-the-mill projectors running on low power.

Wish I hadn't seen that

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=8161338#post8161338

I would not get to excited about screenshots. MMan likes to brag about his screenshots, but you have to understand the camera settings can improve the end result over the actual image.

So... I'm wondering what size and model of screen to get, right ? My new projector was supposed to be delivered yesterday but apparently the truck broke down so they delivered today instead, when I was at work.

No biggie, just drive to the depot and pick it up. Still thinking about what size and model of screen to get. The address of the Purolator depot is "90 Silver Star"

Now you tell me *that* is just a coincidence

On the way home from Purolator I picked up a 2' x 4' piece of masonite painted white on one side, $3.94 at Home Depot. Gives me about a 52" diagonal when watching a 2.35 film.

Everything on the projector is set to "max dim" and of course the picture is still blazing bright. No visible hotspotting but the finish on the masonite is somewhere between eggshell and flat.

A 52" 2.35 image is WAY bigger than a 32" 4:3 CRT, startlingly so. Also brighter and sharper, of course, although when I go up to a 92" screen that will get roughly 3x dimmer.

Hmmm. Projector waiting for me at 90 Silver Star. Hmmm.

There is something very compelling about watching a wide-aspect screen. A 48" x 24" piece of hardboard isn't quite 2.35:1 but it was close enough to see the effect of a 2.35 screen, enough that I might be cutting the 4x8 "that way" (96 x 41) instead of "this way" (85 x 48).

My player (a Pioneer 578) only seems to output up to 480p, not 720p. This is a bit of a disappointment because the Sanyo is reputed to not have a particularly good scaler but is extremely good when fed a 720p signal. Have to read the manual again.

Is there anything new that beats out the Oppo 971, or is that still the way to go for great image quality at decent price ?

Well, congrats on getting the thing fired up! I'm quite envious.

My Panasonic S97S put out a killer 720p or 1080i image with my Z2, that is until I built my HTPC. With the HTPC Nvidia card set to the same resolution as my Z2, using TheaterTek DVD software, the picture is much better than my upconverting DVD player.

John, are you sure your using Low Lamp mode?

Oppo is currently the best upscaling player using HDMI. Check out canuckaudiomart.com locally and someone at the Downsview Toronto area is selling the different Oppo models for decent prices.

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.