CIH with mixed size screen

Using an A-lens, you would still have to zoom the projector to reach the full screen height for 16:9 material.

The lens memory in the JVCs will do what you want. I'd describe the lens memory in my RS55 as accurate, but not always perfect. It is much more accurate if the projector is centered with the screen so no horizontal lens shift is needed. On your proposed screen it should be even more accurate since there is not as much zooming/shifting as on a CIH screen.

Using a Radiance you can do a couple of different things:

1. You can keep the projector zoomed to the full screen width and display 2.35 content just like using the zoom method. Then the Lumagen can shrink/downscale 16:9 content to fit the height of the screen. The lumagen scaling is so good you might not even notice any quality loss (less resolution loss than if this method was used on a CIH screen). This would look essentially the same as zooming (small black bars for all ARs) but AR changes would be faster and more accurate.

2. You could use a combination of cropping and/or stretching to fill the whole screen with either AR. Again, given the quality of the scaling, it should still look very good, but of course a film purist may take issue with this choice.

Could you get a 130 x 55.3 screen and move your seating a little closer so that 16:9 looks the same size as before (keeping the same seating distance to screen height ratio)? That would simplify things and remove the black bars.

Gary

Is your room not wide enough to support the Scope screen width of 144" (2.40:1)?

As has been mentioned, sitting close is one way to make the image appear larger. My front row is 2x the image height off the screen and I love that.