Projection Screen Reviews

Since I saw no visible issues with the Seymour’s color uniformity, I limited my tests to checking brightness uniformity across the horizontal center of the screen, compared with the Stewart StudioTek 130 G3. And the numerical results are useful only as a comparison with this popular (and non-acoustic, higher-gain) industry reference, in my setup with this particular JVC projector. Projectors do not have perfectly uniform light output, and there is no way for us to judge the contribution being made to screen fall-off from the projector versus the screen. In addition to this significant but indeterminable contribution from the projector’s optical light engine, the lens zoom and shift were adjusted slightly to account for the Stewart screen’s being positioned about a foot closer to the projector than the Seymour—a process that may have slightly affected the results.

With the Minolta LS-100 light meter centered behind the projector, the light falloff from screen center to the left side measured 20.5% on the Seymour, 31.5% on the Stewart. This was not unexpected; all screens have some falloff from center to edge, and the higher the screen gain the higher the loss.

Attempts to measure the change in in-room frequency response of the M106 speaker behind the screen and scrim versus its response in free space (in this case I did use the same M106 for the measurements) involved minor variables that couldn’t be eliminated. But the results indicated that the main differences involved a slightly less smooth response from 1 kHz to 5 kHz (in ripples so small that their audibility is questionable), rather than any clearly distinguishable rolloff in the two audible octaves above that point.—TJN