In 1997 I was on the staff of Stereophile magazine as a consulting technical editor, and also a contributor to (and later the editor of) the Stereophile Guide to Home Theater, at the time a nascent publication subsumed into Sound & Vision in the mid 20-aughts (itself a very long story!)
In any case, we were visited that year by Phil Abbate, then a reporter for the AAS (Atlanta Audio Society, today the Atlanta Audio Club). Phil interviewed me during his visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then the headquarters of Stereophile. Whether that interview ever made it into the pages of the AAS (or onto the bits of the then also nascent Internet) I don't know. But during a recent effort to sort out my increasingly cluttered files I ran across a copy of that interview, which Phil had sent me shortly after it happened.
It’s been 50 years now, and poor Mr. Spock still doesn’t have a captaincy. But fans of the Neverending Franchise like him just the way he is.
Or was. Or will be. Star Trek Into Darkness is the second installment of the “new” Trek saga. In the first, director J.J. Abrams cleverly (or alarmingly) rebooted the whole thing through some sort of time-warp, high-tech thingy. The Enterprise is now far more advanced, and some of the relationships are very different, particularly between Spock and Uhura.
Starke Sound demonstrated its relatively small, floor-standing IC-H2 Elite loudspeakers ($4398/pair) together with the new IC-H2C Elite center ($2199 each) and a pair of the company's Sub35 woofers ($1880/each) in a 7.1 channel system.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to acoustically transparent screens. On the downside they reduce screen gain as some of the light passes through them rather than contributing to the brightness of the image. They also affect the sound, however slightly, in much the same way (though sometimes more significantly) as grill on a speaker. And their lack of a completely smooth texture can reduce resolution, which will be even more important with 4K than with 1080p HD.
On the upside they position the sound to best support the picture on the screen...
Stewart Filmscreen’s LuminEsse is a high performance fixed frame screen that can be ordered with any of Stewart’s front projection screen materials. An optional LED light package can be added to surround the screen in a range of available colors...
AT A GLANCE Plus
Excellent picture quality
Competitive with Stewart’s upmarket designs
Minus
Varied sizes and configurations but no custom options
THE VERDICT
Stewart Filmscreen’s Cima lineup offers fewer options than the company’s long-respected but more expensive designs, but it makes Stewart’s pristine image quality now available to a wider range of buyers.
What can one say about a projection screen? Quite a lot, actually. A screen is much more than a bedsheet or the nearest white wall. While it can’t improve the quality of a projector, it can, if poorly designed, most certainly degrade it.
Screens can be solid or (mostly) acoustically transparent. They can be white or various shades of gray (the latter often incorporating special treatments designed to improve performance in a less than ideally darkened room). They’re available in a wide range of gains—1.0 for more or less neutral performance or higher values to enhance brightness from a less than torch-like projector and/or a super-large screen.
Stewart Filmscreen Reflections Active 170 3D Price: Varies by size, type (see review) At A Glance: Higher gain than popular StudioTek 130 G3 • Good off-axis performance and color uniformity • Noticeable hot spot
Da-Lite High Power Price: Varies by size, type (see review) At A Glance: High Gain • Picture darkens visibly off-axis • Hotspotting virtually undetectable
We’ve come a long way from the days when screens were an afterthought. I imagine there are still a few enthusiasts who cut their projection teeth on a sheet or a bare white wall, or even an old, beaded, home-movie screen. Today we know better. The screen is a vital part of the projection setup.
Screens now come in a wide variety of sizes and characteristics. Their physical construction—fixed frame, retractable, flat or curved, masked or unmasked, perforated or not—is a subject for another day. There are also rear-projection screens. Here, however, we’re primarily concerned with the characteristics of the screen material itself, as used in front-projection setups, the type most commonly found in theaters, both commercial and home.
The Blu-ray group has just announced that it is merging with the HD-DVD consortium to produce a consolidated format for high definition on a packaged disc.
High Dynamic range, or HDR, is perhaps the most exciting of the trio of improvements that Ultra HD brings to the table, the others being a wider color gamut and higher resolution. The images from a flat screen set pop off the screen in a way that the dimensional but often too dim 3D never could. And you don’t need special glasses to see it.
A flat screen set, capable of peak brightness levels of over 1000 nits (just under 300 foot-lamberts) can make the most of an HDR source. HDR program material is mastered for a peak output of either 1000 nits or 4000 nits, with most of that luminance reserved for bright highlights.