A screen gain of 2.0 is easy enough to understand. Screens are passive devices, and they have gain only in the sense that they trade off reflections at wider viewing angles for increased reflectivity toward the center of the viewing area. A screen with a gain of 1.0 will reflect the light from the projector equally in nearly all directions. With a higher gain, such as the 2.0 specified gain of the Supernova, the light output visible at off-axis seating positions is deliberately compromised to obtain a brighter image in the middle seats.

Possible Applications
Before we get to the performance of the Supernova, let's look at three fairly typical applications.

Situation One: The Boardroom
This isn't home theater, of course, but I include it here because it is a key application for a screen such as this. As long as the viewers aren't too far off to the left and right of the on-axis seating position, the projector is a high output business model, and you're not planning on holding the meeting outdoors around the pool or in the woods (as one of DNP's promotional photographs suggests!), the Supernova will reward you with a bright and punchy image for those spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

Situation Two: The Darkened Home Theater
Your home theater is already light controlled, but you find that you when you do occasionally want to turn up the lights the image is hard to watch. In this case, you might want to add a Supernova to your existing setup. If your current screen retracts, you could put a fixed Supernova behind it for those occasional lights-up sessions. If your current screen is perforated, with one or more of the speakers behind it, this approach won't work, as neither the fixed Supernova nor the upcoming retractable Supernova Flex is acoustically transparent.

Note: Many installations that fit this scenario are likely to be built around with a not-too-bright CRT. Unfortunately, the Supernova is recommended for single lens projectors only. A three lens CRT need not apply.

Situation Two: Subset Deux
Your home theater is light controlled, you already have a great screen, and you do most or all of your watching in the dark. I would not recommend the Supernova as your primary screen.

Situation Three: The Family Room
It is often notoriously difficult to control the light in a modern family room, though it can be done. If you're unwilling to do most of your serious viewing after dark, or install completely light-sealed blackout drapes (no light leakage around the sides allowed!), the Supernova may be for you. But be sure you want a big screen. If your needs are for a 65" image or less, you should at least investigate the advantages and disadvantages of other options, such as a flat panel or rear projection set.

Setup
My situation most closely resembles the complete blackout condition (it's the only way to properly review projectors), so I had to make do with turning up the lights in my light- controlled room for the evaluation. I used three slightly dimmed, recessed overhead lights in the back of the room several feet behind the seating position (and about 15' from the screen) and two table lamps slightly behind and to the sides of the screen (my screens are mounted several feet forward of the front wall of the room). None of these lights fell directly on the screen. While there's no way I can precisely convey to you just how much this lit up the room, I can tell you that it provided just enough illumination to eat, move around in, and even read by (well, at least the TV listings; I wouldn't want to try to enjoy reading a book with this amount of light). There was no sun flooding through the windows here.

Under these conditions the image on the screen, using a Yamaha DPX-1300 projector (review in progress), ranged from acceptable to very good, depending on the program material. High definition coverage of the Winter Olympics, much of it originating on bright, sunlit, snow-covered ski slopes (except when snow and fog rolled in!), looked great. I had no complaints. The projector had been calibrated on that Studiotek 130 screen, but the gray scale and colors did not appear to shift visibly on the Supernova (for more detail on this, see "Test Results," further on). When I sat slightly off-axis, I did notice that the side of the screen further away from me looked darker than the nearer side—a result of the screen's reflectivity characteristics. But I found this easy to ignore, even after I measured it (the measured difference—again see "Test Results"—was far more pronounced than its visual significance).

With a brightly lit DVD, the result was good. The Cutting Edge is a documentary about film editing, and is generally well lit, with only an occasional dark scene. I enjoyed it thoroughly (I recommend the DVD for those, like me, who can never learn enough about how films are made). Many of the shots are talking heads, and they are superbly presented here. The sharpness of the images confirmed that the screen's composition had no serious negative effect on picture detail. Colors, including flesh tones, were every bit as impressive as they had been on the Studiotek screen in a darkened room.

Things were a bit less pristine on DVDs of very dark material. Flightplan (otherwise known as Jodi Foster Sees Dead People) has many very dark and gloomy scenes, particularly early on in nighttime Berlin and later inside the world's largest jumbo jet with its the interior lights set to nighttime sleep mode. I could always see what was going on, and the image never looked washed out (if anything, the blacks looked a bit crushed) but shadow detail from the Supernova in the specified room lighting was nowhere near equal to that from my Studiotek 130 screen with the room lights off.

That's just the nature of the beast. Not even a well-engineered screen like the Supernova can completely eliminate stray reflections from the ambient light in the room. It certainly does so better than any screen I've yet experienced, including those specifically designed for ambient light applications. But can't repeal the First Law of Screen Dynamics, which says that the black level you see in any program material can never be darker than the screen looks with the same room lighting and the projector turned off. Simply put, projectors do not project black.

To see what I mean by that, see Fig.1. This is a shot of a center section of the screen taken with the left half covered by a piece of black felt. The room lights are at the level described earlier, but the black felt is designed to simulate what any screen should look like if all the room lights were turned off with no projector on and no light leakage from outside sources such as a poorly covered window. In short, in this event you should not be able to see the screen at all! The other half of the image shows two screen materials illuminated only by the test level of ambient room lighting, still with no projector is on. At the upper right is a sample of Stewart Studiotek 130 screen fabric—one of the most widely used materials in front projection home theaters. And at the bottom right is the DNP Supernova. Ideally they would both also look completely black, but they do not. These images represent the blackest these screens will ever go in the test room lighting; you will never see blacks darker than this on these screens from any video program material under the ambient light conditions used here. You can see that the DNP clearly beats the Studiotek in this situation, but not even the Supernova (with room lighting) can come close to the black level possible in a completely darkened room.

Fig. 1

Figs.2 and 3 are screen shots, taken of a small area at the center of the Supernova screen (an area approximately 2 feet wide) in the same room lighting as above. At the center I've placed a small sample of Studiotek 130 screen material for comparison. The superior contrast of the Supernova under these lighting conditions is clearly visible. (Much of the difference you see is due to the higher gain of the Supernova; you should ignore the brightness differences and look instead for the contrast within each area.) What these images can't show is how the DNP's other design characteristics come into play in more difficult, very dark scenes, which are next to impossible to capture in a useful screen shot without a flood of camera-induced noise and other artifacts (the camera used for the shots shown was an 8 megapixel Olympus 8080).

Fig. 2

Fig.3

Conclusions
Does the Supernova, with room lighting, equal the performance of a good, standard screen in a completely darkened room? For the videophile seeking the very best image his or projector can provide, the answer has to be no. And even if it did provide an image every bit as good, there is nothing to compare with watching a good movie in a darkened room, both technically and aesthetically. The darkness takes you away from where you are and puts you somewhere else—one reason films are often so compelling.

But not everyone has that luxury for their home theaters. If you must do most of your viewing in a room with poor light control, want the big screen experience, and can keep your ambient light expectations realistic, the DNP will get the job done better than anything else I know of.

Highs and Lows

Highs
Definitely improves image quality with some room lighting
Durable screen surface
Does not degrade image resolution

Lows
Expensive
A good standard screen in a completely darkened room still provides a superior overall image