Quote:
Originally posted by Alimental
Firehawk because it is a high-gain screen. Better yet, a Vutec SilverStar which is VERY high gain. The higher the gain, the more light from the projector goes to you, not to the sidewalls/ceiling and the less ambient light is reflected towards you. Therefore, you get a much less washed out screen. Grayhawks are too dull and don't do realistic day scenes. Firehawks are better, but a tad muted. SilverStar is like looking out a window a nice sunny day and does very realistic day scenes, though the Firehawk does to better dark scenes. |
When Tryg and I compared the Firehawk, High Power, and SilverStar in his white room with ambient light there was no doubt in my mind that the Firehawk did a better job of handling it. The gray layer tends to kill reflections where a white screen just basically sends them all back to the white walls to come back again. The SilverStar is good for some things, but I didn't find it to be that good at handling his ambient light (which was coming from windows up high and also near the back of his theater room). With an 80" image and an MT8 your images would be extremely bright with the SilverStar, which looked to be about 3.0 gain to me regardless of specs.
I tend to agree with the idea of going with the Firehawk and a neutral density filter if you want that for making some images darker.
And comments about a certain screen being muted would have to be matched up with screen size and projector, as a Firehawk with some projectors and sizes will be brighter than a Silverstar with other projectors and sizes. If the MT8 really is about 1000 lumens as some measurements have said, that puts you at close to 50 ft-lamberts on a Firehawk of that size if you only get 1.0 gain out of it. I have a hard time imagining anybody thinking that 50 ft-lamberts gives muted images. I think you could even consider the Grayhawk or Carada's gray screen, but the tradeoff of the wider viewing cone with those is less positive effect of rejecting reflections off your white walls for those sitting in the sweet spot. That is, if you are always going to be sitting in the sweet spot and don't need the big viewing cone I think the Firehawk is probably the best bet.
A SilverStar of that size looks to be about 150 ft-lamberts or probably more than 10 times as bright as when you go to a movie theater. If you want to see every last little mpeg2 artifact, that is probably a good way to do it.
I've heard that your iris will close down during bright scenes above a certain level and then you aren't getting that much benefit from going brighter, but you are raising your black levels..
Keep in mind that the bulb will age and the brightness will go down and my ft-lamberts value above were for a new bulb. You should consider up to about 50% loss during the life of the bulb.
--Darin
