WHAT MAKES A SCREEN?
Do you need a projection screen if you’re using a front projector? Ideally, yes, although depending on how critical your viewing quality is, you may be able to get away without one.
The main attributes required for a projection screen are that it must be colour neutral, and that it is either not reflective, or reflective only in very carefully designed ways. COLOUR: Perhaps we should have said a screen should be white, but we’d note that there have been some very expensive screens sold over the years which are actually grey. They are designed to deepen the sense of black levels, which tends to be the weakest performance aspect of projectors. But white or grey, the important thing is that the screen doesn’t favour any colour over any other. If it does a little — say, you’re projecting not onto a screen but onto a creampainted wall — you can often use the projector’s settings to largely correct the resulting colour shift. But there are limits. You don’t want to project onto a boldly coloured wall. There’ll just be no way to get those jerseys, nor even the grass on the field, to look quite right. REFLECTIONS: A projector screen — or your painted wall — should not reflect the light which falls on it in any coherent way. It should scatter it so that it is visible evenly from anywhere in the room. Any kind of sheen in the surface and some of the people watching will get bright spots in parts of the image.
The one exception are those special projection screens carefully designed to be directional. They take the light from the projector and bounce a greater proportion of it back towards the main viewing area. That used to be a useful feature a decade ago when projectors were relatively low in output. These days it’s rarely required, except perhaps with the very largest of screens, or for areas where ambient light can’t be easily restricted, like office boardrooms. The image above shows how Stewart Filmscreen’s Phantom HALR (on the left half of the screen) improves daytime viewing even versus a highquality standard-use fabric screen (right side).