How to Pick the Best Projector Screen for You...

Do you wonder whether you need a projector screen? Well, if you do, the answer is simple....If you have a projector you should get a projection screen.

With most modern projectors being bright enough to project a half-way decent image on just about any white surface, including your living room wall, you may not have thought about getting a projector screen. However, you really should upgrade...

Why, you ask? Well, a screen has less texture and will show more accurate colours. Also, paint has less gain than a screen. This means that with the former, the image will appear dimmer than is ideal.

While you don't need to to burn a hole in your pocket, by trying to get a screen that's more expensive than your projector, getting a good-quality screen at the optimum price is important. A good screen can last for a long time, so it's worth investing enough money to get something that's easy to set up and offers decent performance.

Regardless of how much you spend, you should know that screen technology is not some fast-moving tech sector like smartphones or tablets. In fact, the screen you buy today will last for a very long time, possibly much more than your projector will, before needing replacement.

Even if you have a projection screen, you may want to buy a larger screen, as the latest projectors are bright enough to support larger images. Projectors, unlike TVs, are one part of a multipart system.

The screen, room, and projector all play a role in the final image you see. If the screen is wrong, even with the right projector, the image will look wrong. While buying a screen, the main factors to consider are gain, colour accuracy, viewing angle, and texture.

A projector can be perfectly accurate, but the image can still look wrong because of how the screen is affecting it. So, let's look in greater detail at some of the factors we talked about.

Gain is a measurement of how much light the screen reflects. A gain of 1.0 means it reflects the same amount of light as an industry standard white magnesium-oxide board. Screens can reflect less light and have a gain of less than 1.0, or then reflect more light, and have a gain higher than 1.0. A lower gain will produce deeper, darker blacks but will reduce overall image brightness.

In earlier days, this was a real issue, as projectors had terrible, grayish blacks. But this is less of an issue now, with most decent projectors. It also used to be that earlier, a higher gain was necessary, but as projectors have become more powerful, today a gain of 1.0 is often sufficient.

Colour accuracy measures how well the screen reflects the colours projected onto it. With certain screens, certain colours are absorbed more than others and these introduce a tint to the image that isn't coming from the projector.

Many projectors ship with modes that are close to accurate, but these might no longer be accurate after they hit the screen. A screen that introduces as little colour shifting as possible is ideal.

Viewing angles can decide how wide you can sit from the center of the screen before the light drops off. With a gain of 1.0, the viewing angle can be close to 180 degrees, since it reflects everything more or less equally in all directions.

If the gain is higher, the viewing angle gets smaller, as you are focusing the reflected light more toward the center of the room. With a high-gain screen, you should put seats closer to the center of the screen.

The texture of the screen also impacts how much detail you can see. If a screen's texture is evident from your usual seating distance, it will alter the image quality and your enjoyment. If the screen material is very fine, you will not see any texture from a normal viewing distance, and the image will appear smooth.

Now you know more about what to look for when evaluating and buying a HD Projection Screen. Do check out these points and shop online for an interesting and absorbing shopping experience. Here's to the projection of perfect images...