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A splat of all my blathering.
Monday, April 19, 2004
Choosing a home theater projector screen: Part 3 Size
Now lastly but perhaps most importantly I needed to decide how large of a screen I wanted. This is important because people who have no idea about all this work that goes into building a home theater really only comment about one thing... the size factor. "Wow, look at the size of that screen! That's awesome."
I talked with several people about this topic at my local stores and as usual, I got several differing opinions. Some said that quality was more important than size (and that is the tradeoff) and some said that bigger was the only way to go.
In my case I had some limitations because my room is quite small. I also had to figure in what my projector would be capable of doing in quality. I wanted around a 100" diagonal on my viewing area so that meant that I needed a screen that was 6 x 8 (recall that I went with the 4:3 format). I checked DaLite's site for a price on the Model C in this configuration and found that it was about $265. That was indeed very pleasing to me but I wasn't ready to give in just yet. I'm frugal (if you haven't already noticed) and I wanted to check around for better pricing. As it turns out DaLite's price was very good and the only reason that I didn't buy it directly from their website was that I found a local store that would price match. This turns out to have been a great idea because the screen was delivered damaged. I think that this is very rare and the local store was very apologetic (they could see the tears streaming down my face) and helpful. I got the replacement screen 5 business days later and installed it the following weekend.
Since my room is still being finished I just have bare studs on the wall where the screen is going. I had some 3" x 1/4" lag bolts laying around so I put them into the wall and used washers to secure the screen frame. I just couldn't wait to see what my projector and screen would look like together.
I hadn't mounted the projector yet because I still wanted some flexibility after seeing what it looked like with the screen. I sat the projector on top of a really heavy shelf and leveled it with a blanket. It turns out that I was within about 6" of my ideal size. With the 1.2x zoom capabilities of the X1 I could easily scale the image to the 100" diagonal. I was very pleased at how everything was turning out. My next task was to mount the projector on the ceiling.
Posted at 4/19/2004 03:20:00 PM |
I talked with several people about this topic at my local stores and as usual, I got several differing opinions. Some said that quality was more important than size (and that is the tradeoff) and some said that bigger was the only way to go.
In my case I had some limitations because my room is quite small. I also had to figure in what my projector would be capable of doing in quality. I wanted around a 100" diagonal on my viewing area so that meant that I needed a screen that was 6 x 8 (recall that I went with the 4:3 format). I checked DaLite's site for a price on the Model C in this configuration and found that it was about $265. That was indeed very pleasing to me but I wasn't ready to give in just yet. I'm frugal (if you haven't already noticed) and I wanted to check around for better pricing. As it turns out DaLite's price was very good and the only reason that I didn't buy it directly from their website was that I found a local store that would price match. This turns out to have been a great idea because the screen was delivered damaged. I think that this is very rare and the local store was very apologetic (they could see the tears streaming down my face) and helpful. I got the replacement screen 5 business days later and installed it the following weekend.
Since my room is still being finished I just have bare studs on the wall where the screen is going. I had some 3" x 1/4" lag bolts laying around so I put them into the wall and used washers to secure the screen frame. I just couldn't wait to see what my projector and screen would look like together.
I hadn't mounted the projector yet because I still wanted some flexibility after seeing what it looked like with the screen. I sat the projector on top of a really heavy shelf and leveled it with a blanket. It turns out that I was within about 6" of my ideal size. With the 1.2x zoom capabilities of the X1 I could easily scale the image to the 100" diagonal. I was very pleased at how everything was turning out. My next task was to mount the projector on the ceiling.
Posted at 4/19/2004 03:20:00 PM |
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