Best Material for DIY Projector Screen? Experiences and Recommendations

Hello! I have a question about what material is used to make screens for projectors/projectors? Has anyone made such a screen themselves? What are the results?

I am afraid that in-house manufacture of the screen is not an option.
These are special, multilayer materials with special optical properties that you will not produce yourself.

In practice, what comes into play is either the purchase of a ready-made screen or the material itself, or there is a form of screen in the form of paint (but with inferior performance to the traditional one).

Greetings.

The real-life screen has something like micro beads on the surface. They look like they're made of glass, but it's probably some special material on the surface. The effect is that the screen reflects a very large amount of light from its surface. This results in a super-sharp, clear and colour-saturated image; incomparable to an image projected onto a white wall or some 'sheet'. The surface of the screen resembles the rough "glare" on posts along roads outside cities.
You won't make a good screen in home conditions.

In the appendix I have tried to photograph its surface from the "balls". As you can see, it is not a smooth surface. Unfortunately a camera will not capture the effect of a glossy surface. The flash photo gave the whole frame overexposed!
The screen must not be collapsed, as the surface will break as if it were Plexiglas. It can be rolled up, but not collapsed.

and what do you think of white ceramic reversed on the table. I think it's thick enough and has similar properties.

Cerata certainly does not have similar properties to the screen used for the projector.

Globes reflect light in the direction it came from - a matter of spherical shape
and an appropriately chosen refractive index; other materials will reflect in all directions,
other materials will reflect in all directions, so much less will hit the viewer's eye - provided the viewer is sitting reasonably close to the
projector, because if he sits completely to the side, he will see nothing (or almost nothing) on the spheres.

Similar beads are contained in the paint used to paint the lanes on the carriageway - maybe you need to get some?

Hello
Such glass beads are used for sandblasting.
They come in various granulations. I will look for it because I once sandblasted with something like this, I will paint, test and write.
Such balls are cheap from Polish manufacturers,
good luck
darek

Sensible ball sizes are 0.01-0.1mm.

I am thinking about using a small fabric for a canvas and spraying it with paint used for road marking as at work I use it to paint lines on the grass of the football field I know that it reflects light very well and more than once I splashed my trousers so it will not be a problem to roll up the screen , paint I do not have only the fabric plutno is quite stiff whether cotton, linen or synthetic prices are in the range of 40zl per running meter widths up to 210cm so the height of the screen would be the width you can choose according to your liking

Old thread, but I'll pop the question - anyone made a sensible screen themselves? I have a 2.6 x 5 metre sheet to make. The cost of the pro solutions killed me - simply out of the question. I already have the truss to hang the screen on the wall, so I'm not going to give up on the project - the do-it-yourself solutions remain. I'm planning to start with vinyl fabric for large format prints primed white with a silicone paint primer, and then either silicone matte (it has some flexibility) or 'liquid screen'. - i.e. dedicated.
What is your advice?
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edit - I found on some AV forum info about black rubberised roller blind material, white on the front, fine knotted texture. supposedly it works. does anyone know where to buy a roll? On the internet everyone sells ready-made roller blinds with mechanism etc. There is also a polypropylene material for double-sided printing of rollups - block-out type. Would it be suitable - anyone tried it? 100% blackout it gives, but I don't know what about bliks.

The use of paint containing glass beads (see #7) gives much more clarity to the image. Such paint is sometimes used to paint road signs, stripes on the roadway, so I guess it's not very expensive. The point is that most of the light is reflected in the direction close to where the light is coming from, whereas ordinary paint reflects evenly in all directions. Of course, there's also the question of how far away from the projector you can sit to be within range of the increased brightness. You can test the screen material by shining light on it from different directions and seeing if there is a much higher brightness of reflected light when the direction of the light source is close to that from which you are looking, and to what angle between the directions this occurs.

expensive is not 99 PLN/ 18 L allegro But - will it stick to the vinyl undercoat? And the second thing is whether such a paint will not give a "blips" speaking in photographic language. I have concerns that it will. Just look at what happens when you shine a torch on a reflective road sign. The question is - has anyone tested this or are we talking about guesses that it is okay?

I have a factory screen with glass balls. I used to use it to display slides, now sometimes with a projector. Comparing any white screen with a screen made of glass balls is like comparing a Polonez to a Mercedes. My screen doesn't reflect the image projected onto it, it emits it. It's hard to describe, but the effect really is unbeatable. The screen just glows with the image content itself.
I'll look in the comp for a photo I once took when the projector was projecting an image onto it. But did the effect in the photo reflect the actual condition?

Okay, well, I think that I have to do some tests. Unfortunately, the paint and balls are not available in small packages (25 kg of balls is the least I could find) - and the process is such that first you spray paint and then pour the balls (by the way, I wonder how to apply them with equal density on a given surface - pouring them by hand, in my opinion, has no chance). I will look for it outside of Allegro, or I will try to negotiate with someone - I mean the road workers from the construction site next door.
If I manage to do so, I will inform the public of the results.

I found this photo, but you can't really see the actual effect on it. Well, maybe apart from the fact that the singer's white blouse gives the impression that it just glows rather than being projected and the whole screen looks like an LCD on a TV with its own backlight. The strong brightening of the interior is the effect of the screen "glowing" in the room. There was a lamp on the ceiling, but it was very (!) dim.

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Interesting fact: the screen has a black frame around the white surface made of a completely light-absorbing material (something like black suede), so you can go beyond the white surface with the image, and what came out will be "extinguished" by this black frame. The result - as you can see, the whole thing shines, with no stripes on the sides top and bottom. It's just a matter of adjusting the size of the image and its position on the screen accordingly.
As the screen is collapsible, you can set it to 16:9 and not 4:3 as you can see here.
If I can, I'll try to take a picture of the display of one image on two screens at once: the glass one and the regular plastic one.

PS: on OLX.co.uk someone is selling such a screen ("Screen for displaying slides, slides"), only that someone seems to have "washed" it and there are smudges. You MUST NOT even touch the screen with your fingers, because you will see it.

I'll dig up the topic, maybe it will be useful to someone. .

Regarding the use of a reflective coating, it doesn't matter if it's beads or silver pigment, it's not suitable for a fully darkened room if you want to get the best black possible, because any light source, whether it's some small element on the black background of the projected image, or the projector itself letting out left light, it will all be reflected off the reflective surface of the screen, resulting in an exposed (grey) black.

The use of a reflective surface only makes sense in a darkened room, when we don't care so much about the pitch black, but we need the highest possible gain of reflected projector light and then it is best to use grey paint to bring out some contrast from the image.

The web, in the forums, is full of paint mixtures with pigments, just type ALR DIY Projection Screen and you can play around to your heart's content.

As for the screen surface for a well-darkened room, it needs to be matte, but also not a deep matte, which will dampen the light, nor a semi-matte, which will create so-called Hot Spots, which are pinpoint areas that strongly reflect the light source.

The colour of the surface depends not only on the darkness of the room, but also on the black level and maximum brightness our projector achieves. If the projector has an output of ~2000lumens, then a screen with a neutral grey (NCS) shade can be used; if the brightness is lower, then a very light grey will give the best effect.

Personally, I do not recommend a white screen, because the image, even from projectors with very good black values, will not render it as deep as on a light grey screen.

raptor3m wrote:

no matter the spheres

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It matters: the glass spheres used on the screens reflect light in a direction close to the direction from which it came, so that such a screen gives a much higher ratio of image brightness to the brightness of reflected light from other sources than ordinary pigment. This is a technique invented for particle detectors, which initially cost fabulous sums of money - until someone came up with the idea that it would work for projection screens - then production was increased and the technique became much cheaper; then, in addition to screens, it found its way into road signs, pedestrian crossing strips.... mass production started and the technique became as cheap as borscht.

_jta_ All agreed, but I still maintain that such screens, with a layer of high light gain, are not suitable for a fully darkened room if you want to get the deepest possible black level, as it catches the light better than a normal non-reflective surface. And as you yourself mentioned quote "they reflect light in a direction close to the direction it came from", meaning the "left" light from the projector, will also be reflected/amplified and then from a strong black, it turns grey. .

There is no way around the "left" light of the projector - if the screen reflects less, both the "left" light and the right light giving the image - the contrast remains the same.... well, maybe try this: polarise this right light, and reflect only the one with the right polarisation - but this means losing half of the right image light in the projector polariser, and removing half of the extraneous light - still the contrast remains the same. The ball screen only reduces (and greatly) the impact of extraneous light coming from decidedly different directions.

There is a beam-splitting arrangement such that light only goes somewhere if there is an obstruction in one of the possible paths - but I don't think this can be mapped into the projector layout.

_jta_ wrote:

There is no way around the "left" projector light - if the screen reflects less, both the "left" and the right one giving the image - the contrast remains the same....

Correct, it is only by using a grey screen, without reflective properties, and accepting a slight reduction in brightness and a nailing down of the colours, that we gain deeper blacks, which is technically not feasible with a white screen, and additionally with a gain, because then the black is unacceptably grey, even glowing.

Consequently, if our projector is not top of the range, the best solution is to use a grey and matt screen, imo. .

The result will only be lower brightness, the contrast will not be increased.... How about putting a weaker lamp in the projector instead? The result will be the same... .

There could still be a solution: the projector behind the screen, the screen does not reflect the light, it lets it through and directs it at the audience.

In some church they have a problem: they show the words of the prayers on a screen and in the summer afternoon the sun shines directly on this screen. You can't see anything then - no projector shines with the same brightness as the Sun (illumination of over 100,000 lux outside, inside maybe half that). If you had a screen that didn't reflect the light at all, just let it through from the projector at the back of the screen, then maybe there would be something.... I don't know what it's like there now, I haven't been there in the summer lately - maybe something has been worked out.

_jta_ wrote:

The ball screen only reduces (and greatly) the impact of extraneous light coming from decidedly different directions.

Therefore, in a well-darkened room, this function is unnecessary. .

Added after 6 [minutes]:0379bbc99

_jta_ wrote:

The result will only be lower brightness, contrast will not be increased.... How about putting a weaker lamp in the projector instead? The result will be the same...

Overall brightness will be lower, while black levels will be improved, and here there is no argument, as a few months ago I ran a dozen or so trials with different paint mixes and clearly the depth of black on a grey matte screen has improved significantly.

The condition is one, the grey must be neutral and of the right brightness, depending on the capabilities of the projector and the prevailing room conditions.

Reducing the lamp's glow won't do anything when you want to dim the projector's 'left' light. .

So where is this "left" light coming from? Or, instead of combining with a grey screen, would it be simpler to cover up this "left" light?

If it is coming from the projector lamp, then reducing its brightness will deepen the black just as much as using a grey screen. And turning it off will give a perfect one. .

_jta_ wrote:

There could still be this solution: a projector behind the screen, the screen does not reflect the light, it lets it through and directs it at the audience.

The 'left' light, will still be visible on the screen, perhaps a little weaker, that's a fact.

Added after 5 [minutes]:

_jta_ wrote:

Where is this "left" light coming from? Or, instead of combining with a grey screen, would it be simpler to cover up this "left" light?

If it is coming from the projector lamp, then reducing its brightness will deepen the black just as much as using a grey screen. And turning it off will give a perfect one.

And heck knows where from. I don't know that much about it, but the topic is well known and has been discussed many times on topic forums. These cheaper projectors are not perfectly sealed, such as JVC for a dozen or several tens of thousands of zlotys, and the light gets through sideways - unfortunately, this cannot be eliminated by darkening the lamp, and it probably cannot be sealed either. .

raptor3m wrote:

light comes in sideways - unfortunately, this cannot be eliminated by dimming the lamp

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It can't be eliminated; you can dim the lamp by, say, half, or use a screen that reflects only half the light - in either situation you will get 2x less 'left' light and 2x less light of the actual image. But if that light is escaping sideways, then some sort of shielding should help. In cinemas I think they have a separate projector room, with an opening from it through which this proper light comes out, and this 'left' light largely misses the opening and is absorbed (there are probably some black curtains hung in this room). A question of geometry.

_jta_ wrote:

But if that light is coming out sideways, then some sort of shielding should help. In cinemas, I think they have a separate projector room, with an opening from it through which this proper light comes out, and this "left" light largely misses the opening and is absorbed (there are probably some black curtains hung in this room). A question of geometry.

It seems to me that this 'left' light enters the optics because it is rectangular in shape, slightly larger than the projected target image. Hence, I believe that there is no way to obscure this leaking light from the outside, without interfering with the optics themselves. .

I had the same thing with the LG HU70LS projector for 7.5kzł, only there the effect was even worse, and the optics itself was tragic, because it was not possible to set a sharp image over the whole area, only the centre was clear, while the corners (randomly) were blurred. On top of that, the blacks were worse than in a 2kzl projector. Overall, I do not recommend this model, it is definitely not worth the money.

And have you not checked which way this light is coming out? After all, it's you can see (just have to look from the right side).

I explained it badly and misled, sorry. .

I'm not referring to the light around the target image, I'm referring to the whole projected surface which, when the image is supposed to be 'black', is grey/lit.

This is probably due to the optics not being tight enough, which of course is perfectly reasonable given the price shelf of my current projector, which is the Viewsonic PX725HD, although not so much with the aforementioned HU70LS anymore. .

You can now buy projection screen paints, price £300-500 per litre.

ladamaniac wrote:

Now you can buy projection screen paints, price 300-500 zloty per litre.

Why buy paint for 300-500zł when you can choose whatever you want from a mixer, just make it a neutral white or grey colour, it comes out to ~100zł per litre! .

And if you'll need a reflective surface with gain, for daylight viewing, then you buy powdered silver pigment from a plastic shop for ~£20 or, as a colleague mentioned above, reflective microspheres for ~£60 per 500gr to make it more PRO. .

Silver pigment will be no better than a good white paint; the question is what the quality of these microspheres is.