DIY home cinema screen

[Chris Hodges]

[Steve Firth]

Hmmmmm, well you can hope.

[Ron Lowe]

Yes, that's a possibility.

But that's a whole lot more work than painting a sheet of MDF.

However, white is not actually the best for LCD front-projection. The LCD panel is not totally opaque in the blacks, rendering the blacks as a blueish grey on a white screen. Using a neutral grey colour for the screen sacrafices some of the ample available brightness for a deepening of the blacks, and improved shadow detail and overall percieved image quality. This is all well documented on the various AV forums and groups.

Also, a frame-based solution sticks out from the wall more than I want.

6mm MDF is what I have in mind.

I'm fairly well settled on an painted MDF solution at this time. It's just a question of how best to paint it.

I'll be having at it tommorrow or Thursday. Needs to be done and dusted by Fri.

[Owain]

Yeah, next people will be buying the treetrunks for their new staircase with the branches already sawn off!

Owain

[Ron Lowe]

Yes, I can.

Are you seriously suggesting that 6mm MDF will curl at the edges the same as a sheet of

[SirBenjamin]

can I suggest you see how many hours is left on the lamp before going to all this trouble?

Borrowing one of these is a biting nails experience ie your friend might want the bulb replacing should it go down whilst in your possion...price a staggering 200GBP or more. ;-)

[Ron Lowe]

A valid point!

However, that's not a problem in this case. It's borrowed from someplace where I have the necessary authorithy to replace lamps on these things as required...

However, it would be very unlucky. The lamp on this one is only 100 hours old. I know this, because I replaced it last time. At worst, I'd have to drive for an hour and a half round-trip to get a replacement from stock. Also, I'm only proposing to add a few tens of hours max to it.

Also, not that much bother - It's already installed! Projector working, 5.1 surround sound installed and working.

Just the screen to do now.

[Andy Hall]

Any of them - over the TV screen - and play charades instead.

... or for a real war - Monopoly. This can help you determine who is completely without ruth.

[Owain]

Give the kids a spud gun each, send them out the front door and tell them not to come back until they've each brought down five inflatable santas.

Owain

[Mike Dodd]

... aka Blackout blind - My first screen was one of these, black backing with white face. It sufficed for a short while before convincing me I needed something much better. They suffer greatly from rippling - particularly bad for front projection and far worse than that you'd encounter from orange-peel / brush strokes etc.

Try it, for a short period you might find it works okay.

Re. mdf/hardboard - I wouldn't use hardboard unless you can keep it flat, whilst mounted (flex being similar, but less pronounced than the blind ripples), as far as "perfect" screen colour goes, for a short-term solution, if Icestorm is pricey / hard to get (I think I priced it at around £20 for the amount I'd need, a few years ago now) then any paint should do. I'd avoid brilliant white, though :) Although try to keep the amount of colour in the paint to a minimum.

[mike]

I built a screen for my projector out of MDF and I did strengthen the edges because while MDF won't actually curl up like cloth it will curve and is actually more likely to curve if you paint one side.

As for painting it, I used a good quality primer and then two coats of white emulsion and the results were good. I believe that the icestorm simply darkens the whole picture slightly and while some poeple say this improves contrast, I'm not convinced at all as contrast is pretty subjective anyway.

There is a lot of useful advice on

and it's well worth having a look there for more information.

Cheers Mike

[Doki]

I've never sprayed emulsion. Given how jellyish most emulsion is, I'd expect at least 50:50 with water through a primer gun. No idea about an airbrush, not really the same as a spray gun. Be careful to make sure you clean the gun well and dry it if it's not designed for water based...

[Ron Lowe]

Just a follow-up in case anyone is interestied in doing anything similar.

I just got a sheet of 6mm MDF from the local B+Q, and had them cut it to size on their large saw ( easier to transport, and 1 less job for me at home ). In my case, the sheet was cut to 1470 x 1120. This allowed approx 50mm border all round the image. ( Obviously, you need to measure the image as projected on to the wall before you go... , also remember to set the zoom on th eprojector as you want it first! )

The first thing to do is to determine where exactly it needs to be mounted, So I ran the projector onto the wall and marked the extents of the image. I then marked the extents of the sheet onto the wall, knowing the border size I had allowed.

Then you need to determine the locations of the uprights in the wall, and mark these high up on the wall. Offer the sheet up and align it correctly horizontally ( don't care about vertically yet ), and transfer the positions of the wall uprights onto the sheet using a plumb line. In my case, I was able to use 4 fixing points top and bottom. I then drilled any countersunk the 8 mounting holes, and then offered the sheet up again. This time, I aligned it correctly both horizontally and vertically against the markings I made earlier. This required a large table and some misc. shimming to get the thing aligned vertically. I then fixed it to the wall with all 8 screws.

I had intended to then remove it now that all the alignment stuff was done, and paint it horizontally, but I couldn't be bothered and decided to paint it in-situ.

I loosened the mounting screws enough to get sheets of newspaper as masking materiel down the back and sides, to protect the surrounding wall, and then re-tightened them. This worked very well.

1 coat of MDF primer, using large roller. This was almost good enough on it's own! Wait 1 hour, 2 coats IceStorm 5 matt with large roller. Perfect result. No texturing. Very even finish. Rollering was the way to go. 100% happy with result. And quick, too.

MDF: £6.50 IceStorm Paint (1 liter ): £9.98

I already had the primer and rollers.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with the result. It's perfectly flat, no image distortions. The colour is good, and the finish is good.

[SirBenjamin]

So what films do you intend to watch?

Personally I would have just pinned and stretched a white blanket on the wall...saves £16

[EricP]

Route-off you old scrote!

The bloke is happy with his DIY and has a nice glow from doing it himself.

:))

[Owain]

It'll be a shame when the projector has to go back to the office after the holidays :-)

You could add this to the "Projects" category on the wiki if you wanted.

Owain

[Ron Lowe]

Mostly the kids stuff.

We've got all the current kids animated stuff, from Wallace + Grommit to The Wild etc. and the older one also likes LOTR and Star Wars. These all benefit from the Big Screen treatment. I've ben sitting in ther the last 2 nights, and it's been excellent.

I have to say, Standard Definition DVD , even over Component Video and Progressive Scan ( which both the player and projector support ) looks distinctly average at this screen size / viewing distance. Doesn't bother the kids, but if you are a little critical, it will bother you.

Only to be expected, of course. And that's why High Definition becomes important.

I've just 'obtained' a High-Def 'test' copy of Star Wars 3 .ts file at

1280i from bit-tor for comparison purposes, and will try to arrange for a laptop with sufficient video capability to be in the cinema room to compare HD / SD on the same movie. I've viewed the HD movie on the PC monitor, and it looks promising.

Not yet took a laptop through to the cinema room for tests. My Laptop is currently runnig Vista, so that throws another unknown into the equation. I'm using VLC player to play back .ts HD files right now, and I've not yet had time to try the VLC / Vista compatability. Could throw the legacy WinXP HDD back in the laptop, but I'm trying to give it up.

Depends on your criteria.

Price was not my main issue. In general, the reason I DIY is to get what I want, at the standard and quality I want. And this generally exceeds commercial offerings. If it didn't, I'd buy the commercial offering.

I'm happy that I was able to exceed commercial products price-wise by a substantial margin, whilst not conceding on quality. I think a pinned blanket would not have reached my quality bar. But each to his own. That's the whole DIY ethos.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Ron Lowe" saying something like:

Dulux? I can't find any mention of it on their site, so I wonder if it's been discontinued. Is it a light grey or silver?

[Ron Lowe]

It's been re-named recently, apparently.

On the new colour swatches, it's called "Ebony Mists 5", ( where Ebony Mists

1 thru 5 is a range of greys. ) although when the paint mixing person went to the mixing machine computer, they still entered the name 'Icestorm' to search the machine's database of names. So they've not updated the mixing machine software yet ( at least here in Aberdeen. )

The code is 00NN 62/000

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Ron Lowe" saying something like:

Thanks. I'll be making a screen sometime soon and that's useful to know.