CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[perisoft]

I'm setting up an HT in a downstairs room. It's mostly dedicated but the wall the screen is against has a door and a window which we'll want to access.

The plan is to have uber-thick multilayer velvet curtains backed with blackout material cover the entire wall, either set up like giant drapes or similar. That takes care of the back surface.

The screen is another issue. I'd like something pretty damn big - probably pushing the limits of what my 808s can do, but I'll take a bit bigger over a bit sharper. Plus, it's easier to upgrade the projector...

Since I'm on a tight budget, first thought is to make a 'solid' framed screen and have it rotate down from the ceiling. I'm planning on treating the ceiling and walls so I can even make it match. But it's kind of a pain to do, and it means if there's anything accidentally in the way of the sweep when it rotates down, POKE. Ergh.

So I thought I'd see if anybody knows of ways to DIY a rolldown that doesn't wrinkle/bulge/skew. The room's 12' wide, so I'm thinking something around 120" horizontal (yes, too big, I know. Blah blah *blah*). Any suggestions?

One possibility is to roll (ha ha) my own rolldown, maybe making it easier by having a couple of tensioned guide wires on each side so it would basically stretch itself to a form as it unrolled. This would leave me with guide wires that people could garrot themselves on if they walked too close to the walls, but hey, better them than the screen.

If I could find some really stretchy material, I could put the guide wires on movable tracks horizontally, and stretch/shrink the screen itself to switch between 2.35 and 16:9 instead of masking! That would rock, but even though I've got a lot of servos and controllers around it might still be tricky to pull off mechanically along with limiting the screen surface options. But it would be freaking cool.

[Moose]

[nautikal]

Try the Wilsonart Designer White laminate (search for a thread here titled "Screen choices"). It's around $120 for a 5x12 sheet or if you're in MD it's around $50 from Reico.

And I'll just bring up the size issue. Yes, 120" is too big, and there's not just the issue of sharpness as you mentioned, but brightness as well. A 120" wide screen has 56% more area than a 96" wide screen and will therefore be 56% less bright than a 96" wide screen. Of course it is your choice, but you'll be driving that barco real hard.

[perisoft]

That 120" is intended for 2.35:1, though... I'm thinking - lemme do some calculations.

A 96" wide 16:9 screen is 5184 square inches, and a 120" wide 2.35 screen is 6127 square inches. So in this case I'm not driving 56% more area; I'm driving 18% more area. Significant still, but not nearly as bad as if I were trying to do 16:9 at that width.

Of course, if you're usually running letterboxed content in your 16:9 screen it's a moot point.

I'm not sure I'd end up going with 120 anyway. I need to see what feels right in the space; 120 would be the absolute maximum I'd want to run.

I guess there's also two separate ways to drive the PJ harder - you can demand more overall light output from the PJ, which pounds the power to the guns, and you can demand the same power jammed into a smaller area of phosphor, which wears the phosphor harder.

What's the limiting factor here, I wonder?

[nautikal]

Sorry, I thought you were using a 16:9 screen.

[paw]

Check out this site

http://www.seymourav.com/

They have electric screens for decent price. You can get the without cases for less $. This is good for in ceiling installs.

I notices that electric screen prices are going up on 11/1/07

This is similar if not the same material as SMX.

http://www.smxscreen.com

Both are acoustically transparent screen materials. Cliffy here has SMX

[CRT_Ben]

[Spanky Ham]