[HeadRusch]

I dont own a FP right now...I demoed a Z1 for about a week this past year, hated its visual quality, and returned it...opting to wait for a better solution that put out dark blacks as contrast and deep black levels were apparrantly much more important to me than I thought.


However, there was a byproduct of the trial I did: I realized how much I disliked all of the light that was thrown off by my screen.


I own a 65" Mitsubishi RPTV....when its going, the room is black.....I mean, sure, the RPTV throws out light, but otherwise the rest of the room is QUITE dark.


With the FP set up, however, projecting onto a hanging piece of 1/8" MDF I had covered with blackout cloth, the room lit up enough for me to actually read by.


I have very low ceilings....a drop ceiling covering pipes in my basement, and my carpet is an off-white ...I know, bad for a theatre. Walls are wood paneling but mostly covered with kitch (Movie Posters, etc).


Is there any way to cut down on the amount of light reflected back into my room?? My screen obviously had no black border on it, and its not even perfectly flat, it developed a slight bowing......but I was curious if a good quality screen would affect how much light was reflected back into the room.

 

[ilsiu]

Did you think that the projector image on screen was too bright? I think it's safe to assume that the light output of the projector is much brighter to start with than the 65" RPTV (after all, the screen is probably much larger than 65").


In order to have an image, the screen must reflect light. If you want to reduce the light reflected, use a less reflective screen (e.g. grey screen), or lower the brightness of the projector. Of course you'll get a dimmer image.


If you're concerned about light bouncing off the screen and illuminating the celing, floor, and side walls, and you don't want to dim the image on screen, you can paint everything in the room black, but the screen will still be reflecting a great deal of light. Or you can use a screen with a very narrow viewing cone - the light reflected off the screen will be very directional and the amount of light reflected off to the sides will be reduced. This also means that people not seated directly in the screen center will see a dimmer image (this is essentially the same effect in the RPTV).


Unfortunately, all of these solutions (except painting the room black) compromises image quality in some way.


Regards,

I-Liang

 

[HeadRusch]

I only had a Sanyo Z1 for a brief time, and in that time the image was always 'washed out'. No matter what I tried, the picture looked washed out.


I kept trying to adjust the picture, but the only thing I could do was produce a washed-out picture. Colors looked washed out....blacks looked like the kind of black you get when you wash a black t-shirt about 300 times......that faded, grey black. Not a deep, inky black.


Then it began to dawn on me that part of the problem might have been because my room reflects too much light around, and as a result no projector would be able to do a black "black" in my darkened environment, because the ceiling (white drop ceiling tiles) and the floor (an off-white carpet) just reflected too much light around the room and thus made everything apepar washed out.


Thing was, as I adjusted brightness and contrast with AVIA, the whole picture still looked washed out. I'm guessing this was the contrast ratio of the Z1 projector (which is low...800:1 I think??)...