ESSENTIAL PROJECTORS AND SCREENS
THE PROJECTION POSITION Barry Sheldrick, Director of Sales at DbM, takes a look at the trends occurring inside the projectors and screens market. The number of projection systems that we are being asked to design and specify are increasing, with the trend over the past two years has been towards larger screen sizes. Five years ago, the average screen size in the UK was probably around 3m, but now seems to be 4m+, which is a huge increase in image surface area. Without a doubt, the increase in resolution that the greater availability of UHD content has given us has also enabled the move to the larger screen sizes. We are seeing larger screens in similar sized rooms and a shift from a 45-degree viewing angle to a 50 or even 58-degree viewing angle in several projects. The visual impact of increasing the view angle is huge! The image is more immersive, more engaging, and more lifelike for most people. We’ve designed the front row of our Reference demonstration system to have a 58-degree viewing angle, whilst the rear row has a 45-degree viewing angle. This has proven invaluable when dealers have had their clients in for demonstration - as it helps the client to understand the impact of screen size versus
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viewing distance, which really helps the dealer to be comfortable with the decision on what they are specifying. Two key benefits of projection systems are that you can choose a screen size and ratio to the millimetre. With large format displays, you are usually given fixed sizes to work with due to how these displays are assembled. With an acoustically transparent screen, you get perfect placement of the LCR’s behind the screen, (which really ramps up the immersion and dialogue delivery), tying the actor’s voices to their mouths on screen. The final part is delivering true HDR, which doesn’t just mean brightness; HDR provides us with DCI P3 colour space as well. Just as calling video content ‘4K’ and focussing on pixels missed the contrast improvements of HDR, talking about the contrast and not the enhanced colour palette is also missing a key improvement over HD content. The DCI/P3 colour spaced gives a huge improvement in colour saturation, making the images have more depth and look more lifelike. The challenge is having a projector display with
this increased colour palette. This requires even more light output or a discrete RGB light source, both of which we are more than happy to support you with when designing your projects. When you combine the ability to deliver DCI colours, in multiple aspect ratios, in millimetre size increments and with perfect placement of your LCR’s, it is easy to see why projection systems are so loved in dedicated cinema spaces. We’ve also been specifying a number of innovative ways to conceal the projectors with the use of mirror systems, which has really made it much simpler to deploy these systems.
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