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16 FOOT WIDE Movie Screen at home help please

71.156.46.35

Posted on March 1, 2007 at 21:00:16
mitch4t


 

16 FOOT WIDE Movie Screen at home help please
xx.
Until now, I have been throwing a 12ft x 9ft image on a blank wall that is approximately the color of the pale yellow that the page you are now reading. The projector is about 20 feet away from the wall. For three or four years, this has been very satisfying to view movies.

My projector is a Sharp XR-20X with brightness of 2300 lumens and 2000:1 contrast ratio. I paid $1,000 for the projector.

Now I want an even bigger picture. So, I went out and bought myself an actual screen. The screen will hang from the ceiling and will roll up when not in use.

I have just purchased a Da-Lite 16ft wide by 12ft high movie screen.

I discovered that in order to get the picture to be 16 feet wide, I had to move the projector back further. Of course when I moved the projector back, it was not bright enough to my satisfaction. On really bright scenes, the picture was fine, but when darker scenes appeared....there was not enough contrast and the whole scene appeared dark.

I looked on the Projector Central website and found that in order to get a projector to throw an image that large with a longer throw distance, I would need a projector with an output of 6,000 lumens. Or, roughly three times the output of my current projector. Those projectors start at $6k to well over $20-30k. Waay out of my league.

I found a company that makes a wide-angle lens adaptor that will allow a shorter throw distance for a larger image. I asked the sales person what effect the adapted lens would have on the image. She told me that it could decrease the light output by 5 to 20 percent. The new lens would give me a 50% larger image from the same throw distance that I have now.

The room is 22ft wide and 70ft long with 22 ft ceilings. The screen will be suspended from the ceiling. The ceiling is concrete. The projector will be on the floor.

Please share your thoughts on all of this please.

Please click on my system page to see the room that the screen will be in. The screen will be against the wall where the window is. I am going to re-configure the whole room in order to accommodate viewing movies.

I am able to make the room pitch black. The window in the picture is the only source of sunlight.

Click here to see the conversion lens I am thinking about getting: CONVERSION LENS

Click here to see the screen that I have MY SCREEN

I will have the screen installed next week.

Click here to see MY ROOM and my system.

My home theater sound is a 5.1 configuration. I just can't imagine any more speakers than I have now in order to go 7.1 or 9.1.

I have tested the 16ft by 12 ft image on a beige painters drop cloth at the end of the room where the window is. I think I may be on to something...it looks promising. Sitting from 20 feet away from the screen, it is like sitting in an IMAX theater.

This room will serve as my living room and my 2 channel listening room. The screen and projector have to be put away when not in use. (well, the screen will roll up)

The big question mark is the conversion lens.

Worse case scenario is that the screen can be rolled down to a 12ft or 9ft height.

Click the link below to see my room and my system.

 

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Re: 16 FOOT WIDE Movie Screen at home help please, posted on March 2, 2007 at 05:46:59
Bubba


 
How about "stacking" a couple of projectors? That wasn't an unusual practice back when CRT projectors were SOTA, providing money wasn't an issue. All you do is point two projectors at the screen and make sure they're converged identically. Double the brightness, and probably 4 times as many service calls for the tech to redo the convergence as the projectors drifted.

 

Re: 16 FOOT WIDE Movie Screen at home help please, posted on March 5, 2007 at 08:26:56
Chris S.
Audiophile

Posts: 16
Location: The Woodlands, TX
Joined: September 30, 1999
The key factor is lumens per given area (per sq. ft. in your case). Going to your larger screen dropped that by half, which is a bad thing since you don't have more lumens to compensate for that. Also, using that lens you mentioned will only drop your lumens output even more, so I don't think that will fix it. It is true that less light is lost the closer the projector is to the screen, but I don't think that the 5-20% loss incurred by the lens will be overcome by moving your projector closer. The lens certainly will not overcome the 50% drop in lumens incurred by moving to a much larger screen. You may attempt to try a high-gain screen, however on such a large screen with a low-light projector you will probably have issues with screen uniformity and viewing angles.

Honestly, for a 240" diagonal screen you really do need a "light cannon" projector, which are unfortunately expensive. You also want to be careful about just looking at lumens, because after calibration the light output drops quite a bit from maximum.

 

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