If you’re looking for a projector, particularly if you’re new to them, there’s a good chance you’re not paying enough attention to a screen to go with it. Sure, some people are content to aim a projector at a handy blank wall. But in truth, whatever you use as a screen is the last optical element between the projector’s imaging chip (or chips) and your eyes. If you care about image quality, you should pick one that at worst won’t degrade the image badly, and at best will improve it.
Talk to video enthusiasts, and they’ll suggest screens that can cost thousands of dollars, even for the 100- to 120-inch diagonal range that’s common for home use. For cinephiles, screens made of expensive material like Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 100—which is often referred to as reference screen—can be worth investing in, especially since you can likely amortize their cost over two or more projectors. That said, you don’t have to spend four figures for a good screen, though you’re well advised to spend more than the $30 to $50 of the cheapest you’ll find online. Vendors like Silver Ticket Products and Amazon offer an assortment of screens for $200 and up that have won praise for being good values.
Whatever your price range, you need a screen with the right features for your setup. Screens can affect color, contrast, image brightness, and brightness uniformity. There are ambient light rejection (ALR) screens that can help keep images from getting washed out in rooms filled with light, and acoustically transparent screens that will let you hide your speakers behind them with little or no loss of audio quality. Here’s a look at the key issues to consider.
Screens vs. Screen Material
Most screen characteristics fall into one of two categories, related either to the screen material or to whatever frame or mechanism it’s attached to, which for lack of a better term I’ll call the “screen model.” Optical characteristics, including factors that affect image brightness and contrast, fall in the first category. Physical characteristics (such as size, shape, and whether the material is stretched over a frame or rolled up in a pull-down or pull-up format) are in the second.
Note that specific screen models often let you choose from a variety of materials. Elite Screens’ entry-level Sable Frame Series, for example, is available with a variety of materials including acoustically transparent and ambient light rejection options, and high-gain materials that boost image brightness. (More on gain in a moment.) It works the other way, too—the same screen material is often available for different screen models.
Detailing all the variations in screen models would take an article of its own, so I’ll gloss over them here except to say that some are designed for portability, while others are designed for permanent installation, and you should obviously pick one that matches your intended use. However, a few physical characteristics apply to all types of screens and deserve mention here. These include the shape, size, and border, usually black, around the edge of the screen.
Shape (Aspect Ratio)
In most cases, you should have chosen a projector with the same native aspect ratio—the ratio of width to height—as the images you view most often, and you should chose a screen with the same aspect ratio as well. Matching all three will let you avoid the black bars from letterboxing seen above and below, or to the sides of, an image when aspect ratios differ.
For business or education use, 4:3 for XGA’s 1,024 by 768 pixels or for standard definition (SD) TV at 420i or 420p is one likely aspect ratio, and 16:10 (including 1,920 by 1,200 and 3,840 by 2,400) is another. For home entertainment, the most common aspect ratio is 16:9 for widescreen formats. These include 720p, 1080p, and 4K (3,840 by 2,160).
A less common choice for home entertainment is Widescreen Cinemascope with a 2.35:1 or 2.4:1 screen such as Silver Ticket’s STR-235125-WVS, but it requires complicated setup decisions that put it outside the scope of this article. I’m mentioning it only because you should be aware that it’s a possibility.
Size and Borders
There are any number of rules of thumb for picking the ideal screen size for the distance at which you’re sitting, or conversely, for how far away you should put your seating for a given screen size. For boardroom or education settings where you might need to read relatively detailed charts or smaller text, for instance, you’ll generally want a screen height about 25% of the distance to the farthest chair, regardless of aspect ratio.
For home entertainment with a 16:9 screen, the most common suggestions are to multiply the diagonal measurement of the screen by 1.6, 1.5, or 1.2 to get the best seating distance. If you’re setting up a home theater with multiple rows, the smallest and largest numbers in the range can help you choose where the front and back rows should ideally be for your screen size.
More often, you’re trying to find the right size screen for a family room with an already positioned couch. The magic numbers here are 1.2 and 1.6. If the couch puts your eyes 12 feet (144 inches) from a wall-mounted screen, dividing by 1.2 gives you 120 inches for the screen diagonal, while dividing by 1.6 gives you 90 inches. The span from 90 to 120 inches defines a range of diagonal screen size you should modify for personal taste. If you prefer sitting toward the front of a movie theater, you’ll also prefer a larger screen size. If you like sitting further back, you’ll prefer a smaller screen, but should avoid going below the smallest size in the range.
Some screens offer surrounding borders in a choice of designer colors, but border colors can influence how you perceive nearby colors on the screen, so it’s best to stay with black. Thin borders are in fashion today, but there’s such a thing as too thin—many projectors add a dark gray glow around the picture itself, which can be annoying in a dark room if it falls on the wall surrounding the screen. Screen Innovations’ 5 Series, for instance, has a 3.5-inch bezel while its Zero Edge Pro models offer a choice of 0.75-inch or 1.5-inch.
Make sure the border of any screen you get is wide enough to contain that glowing area completely, so it won’t be visible. A wide border can also make it easier to position a projector’s image. It’s better to have a few pixels disappear into a non-reflective border with an image that’s slightly too big or off center than it is to wind up with a blank area on screen between the edge of the image and the border.
Screen Material Basics: Gain, Color, Contrast, and Texture
One of the key features of any screen material is gain, which tells you how the screen will affect brightness. Technically, gain is the ratio of light reflected from the screen to the light reflected from the industry-standard white reference surface. The easiest way to think of it is that with a 1.0 gain screen, if you measure brightness with a meter, you’ll (at least theoretically) get the same result whether you point the meter at the screen or at the projector.
With gains higher than 1, pointing the meter at the screen will measure a higher brightness. A 1.1 gain screen makes the image 1.1 times as bright as a 1.0 gain screen; a 1.2 gain makes it 1.2 times as bright; and so on. In other words, a 1,000-lumen projector paired with a 1.2 gain screen will give you the same image brightness as a 1,200-lumen projector with a 1.0 gain screen.
Screens deliver gains higher than 1 by reflecting more light toward the center. Maximum brightness is measured in a position that’s centered and perpendicular to the screen, and it falls off as you increase the angle of view to the left or right. The effect is similar to what happens with LCD monitors, whose images are noticeably dimmer when viewed at extreme angles rather than sitting centered in front.
The range of what’s called the “viewing cone” is defined by the angle of view at the points where brightness drops to 50% of the brightest point. Note that this isn’t as big a drop as you might expect: Perceived brightness is logarithmic, not linear, so a drop of 50% in measured brightness is enough to notice but is actually perceived as considerably brighter than half as bright.
Screens with gains in the range of 1.0 to 1.3 tend to have wide viewing cones. The widely praised Stewart StudioTek 130 G4 material, for example, offers a 1.3 gain and a 160-degree viewing cone. However, still-higher gains typically have narrower viewing cones, so you need to make sure that your seating arrangement puts everyone inside the cone. Note, too, that the higher the gain, the more likely the screen is to show hotspotting, with some areas noticeably brighter than others.
Some screens have gains below 1.0, which lowers image brightness—pairing a 0.6 gain screen with a 1,000-lumen projector will give you the same brightness as a 600-lumen projector with a 1.0 gain screen. These screens, such as Da-Lite’s Parallax with 0.8 gain Parallax Pure surface, usually have a gray rather than white color. Their advantage is that, by lowering brightness in the dark areas of an image, they lower the black level by enough to increase perceived contrast, particularly in rooms with ambient light. In theory, they don’t improve contrast in a dark room. But if you have light-colored walls or furniture, light bouncing off the screen and reflecting back to it from the surroundings can be enough for gray screens to improve contrast even with the lights off.
The texture or smoothness of the screen isn’t much of an issue at resolutions of 1,920 by 1,080 or below, but can be an issue at 4K. If there’s any kind of texture on the surface, whether from coatings or from the perforations in many acoustically transparent screens, the graininess can rob the image of fine detail or even appear as an artifact. Some screens are designed for higher resolutions; the StudioTek 130 G4 material, for example, claims support for 16K resolution. However, some video enthusiasts have seen subtle grainy artifacts using it that they don’t see with Stewart’s StudioTek 100 material.
Ambient Light Rejection and Ultra Short Throw Issues
ALR screens perform a bit of technological magic to keep ambient light from washing out images. Different materials accomplish this in different ways, but most are designed to deal with light coming from some directions in one way and light coming from other directions differently.
The Screen Innovations Slate 1.2 screens, for instance, take advantage of the fact that—with standard throw projectors—the viewer and projector can both be in the viewing cone. The screen material uses one set of particles that both absorbs and diffuses light from all directions, and a second set that reflects light coming from within the viewing cone back to the cone. Other screens use different techniques to absorb or diffuse light or redirect light from specific directions, as with ceiling lighting, away from viewers. What they have in common is that they’re all designed to keep ambient light from washing out the image.
The rule for ALR screens is that you must pick the screen based on where you plan to put the projector. For example, the Slate 1.2 material not only requires that the projector be in the viewing cone, it has to be at least 1.5 times the screen width away from the screen. That means you can’t use it with short throw, much less ultra short throw (UST), projectors. If you have a UST projector, look for a screen specifically designed for UST models such as Grandview’s PE-L100DY3 Dynamique UST.
If you’re shopping for a screen to pair with a laser-based UST projector for your family room, an ALR screen designed for UST models is a virtual requirement if you really want to use the projector just like a TV even in daytime. Be aware, however, that with any UST projector in any lighting conditions, there’s another important issue as well.
Specifically, UST projectors need as flat a screen as possible. With the lens just inches from the screen, slight variations in the surface that wouldn’t matter for longer throws create obvious distortions in image geometry. Screens that are mounted on frames and properly stretched without wrinkles are good choices. If you need a screen that rolls up to hide away when you’re not using it, choose one with tensioned edges that will help hold it flat when in use.
Finding a Sterling Screen: A Final Word
There are other issues you’ll want to consider. If you plan to use your screen for backyard movie nights, for example, you’ll need one you can either set up and break down quickly or safely leave outside and later clean easily. (They’re not famed for their image quality, but you can even buy inflatable outdoor screens that come with an air blower like a bouncy house.) Similarly, there are other choices not discussed here for indoor screens, such as screens for rear projection that let you put the projector behind instead of in front of the screen.
All that said, if you factor the issues covered here into your buying decision, you should wind up with a screen that takes both your projector and issues like ambient light levels into account. And if you didn’t already realize how important the right screen can be to image quality, you should at least have some idea now of how much difference your screen can make.
