Fivestroke
Welcome to AVS
I'm a huge Film Noir, Classic, Vintage film buff as well. And I also enjoy new releases along with on line content, still photo shows and IMAX . B&W was also a concern for me as well. I also share your like of a minimal level of ambient light (task lighting) during certain types of viewing, sports being one, or any viewing where there is some interaction between the viewers and that could be watching family vacation movies or stills or movies with the kids where you want to keep a eye on things. Based around all this and still wanting the absolute best light control thus contrast for that film like image for Film Noir etc. I put a lot of thought into the room design DIY screen design along with projector selection.
My first criteria was I needed a Academy aspect ratio projector (4:3) the reason being is your screen width and seating distance once fixed you will not be happy watching a huge classic movie cropped into a 16:9 or scope screen. This goes against 99.9% of the advice most will give you but the vast majority of HT enthusiasts see wide screen as their primary interest and 4:3 as being dead and outdated, and when it's a must watch they feel reducing the size improves on the poor quality of the SD signal such as regular TV. That is true and most 4:3 projectors have three modes of cropping one being a window mode that compresses the picture smaller.
The real issues with going 4:3 is the projectors in this mode are labeled business projectors and the vast majority are XGA resolution 1024x768 the bottom end of what most call HD. Business projectors are also normally higher lumens, lower cost and some do well at displaying movie content and some not as good. The extra lumens is something I desired for all the mode of viewing I'm doing as they will indirectly help you maintain perceived contrast with that controlled task lighting with the right screen.
I selected DLP and have had no issues when viewing B&W, calibration is important as many that see rainbows find them easier on B&W material especially if the foot lambert level off the screen is too high. I personally love DLP and I have had at least 50 different people in the theater and haven't had a rainbow complaint yet, not saying you may not find you have issues just that with the newer higher speed color wheels etc. its becoming more rare.
I guess a picture is worth a 1000 words so I will attach a few showing how some old movies have been restored and transferred to DVD with amazing results while others have just been transferred and still have all the film stock issues you would see if watching the movie off a 60 year old film. The screen shots were just taken without any special tweaking and I made no attempt to get shots that look different than what I see normally. The cam does distort some of the photos a little out of square that's not the screen bowing. All images below are from std DVD, HD sources like cable look much sharper. Clicking on any of the photos will take you to a page where you can select full size and really get a close look at the image.
Newer AR.
Think about and experiment with some painters tape and a chair screen sizes and viewing distances. My viewing distances is 10' first row and 14' second row on riser. Screen size is native 72x 96 and in 16:9, 54 x 96. Most 4:3 projectors allow you to use the unused pixels when in 16:9 mode to do a vertical image shift. And the first (hulk) picture the image has been pushed to the top of the screen to show what no masking looks like on the bottom.
Like I said this is not for everyone just what worked for me and hopefully answered a few questions what another B&W fan did.
