Building a new Cinema room, should i go for an ALR Screen?

MrFrosty

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I'm mid way through a renovation project on our new sitting room, I've had agreement that I can have a home cinema and pool table (was amazed on the latter!) however this will not be a bat cave, in fact I've had to try hard to hide as much stuff as possible, flush mounted screen etc. I've designed things around a 160" (350cm wide) 16:9 tensioned screen to hang above the fireplace with the original plan of going for an Epson 9400 but that may change once the reviews on the LS12000 are out.

The room is 5.2m wide and 10m long plus a stick out bit, vaulted ceiling 6m high, the projector will hang off a roof A-frame 6.5m away from the screen just missing that chandelier. using a throw calculator it tells me i'll get 96nits using a 1.0 gain screen but only 77nits for a 0.8gain screen which most ALR screens tend to be.

as you'll see from the photos there is one large outside window which will have thick curtains with blackout liner so the room will be fairly dark, the walls are natural stone and so I'm not sure how reflective these will be. One of the images is a pano to get the whole room in which explains the distortion.

fyi, i more than likely will run an HTPC as source, i did this many many years ago for when home cinema was just beginning. (i've still got the old NEC DLP Projector!)

i know a few here are running the Epson 9400 on similar sized screens and so your comments and advice would be appreciated. ALR for this environment?
 

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I know some companies actually do ALR screen with positive gain, Screen Innovations do a 1.2 gain but they are very expensive.
 
the walls are natural stone and so I'm not sure how reflective these will be.
If that's the final color, I would say a lot!

You need ALR screen in there.

Look initially I had my walls and ceilling painted in matt grey which made the room way darker than what you are having there. I thought that this is it, but after putting a lot of black velvet on walls , on ceilling and on the floor I can honestly say that there is a night and day difference.
 
yes final colour, sounds like ALR is the way to go then, thanks, i'll just have to find a way to keep as many of those lumens as possible whilst still having a decent image. the LS12000b+MADVR might rescue me here i guess. i'll also look into ALR screens with higher gains.
 
yes final colour, sounds like ALR is the way to go then, thanks, i'll just have to find a way to keep as many of those lumens as possible whilst still having a decent image. the LS12000b+MADVR might rescue me here i guess. i'll also look into ALR screens with higher gains.
I would suggest trying to demo a few demos of ALR and grey screens, if you are down in the south west of England you could contact @Rickyj at Kalibrate and ask him about his DiverseScreens as well as some others. ALR screens are brilliant at light rejection but by design they have a very narrow viewing angle is roughly 45 degree either side of straight on, so if you are intending to have sofas off to either side of the screen those people will get a much duller image that those looking straight on, so keep this in mind.

Which is why I suggest trying to get a few demos along side some regular grey screens because their viewing angle is the same as a normal white screen but do improve the blacks a bit more, I have one and I can quite easily watch stuff with very low level ceiling spots turned on but obviously lights off give the best results.

I don’t think you have to worry about having a negative gain screen with the LS12000, it’s got loads of light output and since it doesn’t have a filter for HDR it will be able to deliver approximately 50% more light than the 9400 will produce in either of its two dedicated HDR modes.
 
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I'm interested to hear other people's views of the Screen Innovations ALR screens. I got the test kit (still have it actually!) and taped the various samples (pulled out of the box blind) to my existing screen, to compare them. Weirdly, we found that the top-whack Black Diamond had an odd pink-purple tinge to it. It really looked bad. So we went for their second-from-top 'Slate' model in the end.

ALR itself is brilliant. Very happy with it and the viewing angle is fine. What I find quite nasty though is that when there's a solid expanse of colour being displayed (a sky for example, or the green baize if you're watching snooker!), you can really see the 'texture' of the screen. And of course once you see it, you can't unsee it for the rest of the evening and you keep focusing on it!

Has anybody else experienced this? I was wondering if Stewart screens suffer from the same problem? It's bad enough that I'd consider shelling out for another screen (it will be my fifth in total!), especially as I have a JVC NZ9 on order. Seems daft to compromise such a good projector with a 'furry' screen.
 
My tests with the samples, both with no image (just ambient light) and some sample images. See what I mean about the pinks?
 

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It is also a great demonstration of ALR however. Look how much better the contrast is. Obviously we went for the bottom left one.

I forget the make of the previous screen (i.e. the reference image in the background), but it was about £1200 for a 120".
 
It is also a great demonstration of ALR however. Look how much better the contrast is. Obviously we went for the bottom left one.
Based on those images I too would have went for the bottom left, that said I am sure a good calibrator could allow for that pinkish tone and get it looking spot on.
I forget the make of the previous screen (i.e. the reference image in the background), but it was about £1200 for a 120".
Was it Slate 1.2 or 0.8 you ended up with?
 
We went to Ricky’s Kalibrate for a demo of a React ALR screen as our cinema (living) room is predominantly dark Dulux Polar Flame 5 which is a mid tone. My wife was definitely not for painting the room black! It’s been superb for four years now
 
We went to Ricky’s Kalibrate for a demo of a React ALR screen as our cinema (living) room is predominantly dark Dulux Polar Flame 5 which is a mid tone. My wife was definitely not for painting the room black! It’s been superb for four years now
Out of curiosity does it have a pinkish tone to it when not calibrated for it?
 
No I don’t think so!
I was wondering that because prior to getting my grey screen from Ricky I had ordered samples from several companies and all of them appeared pretty neutral not that it's probably that big of a deal to tune out.
 
No, looks very neutral and Ricky spent all day calibrating the whole system plus our Kuro LX5090 plasma we had at the time (Panasonic 65FZ802B OLED now). So pleased with the React in our light room. The only thing I’d change is go larger!
 
Out of curiosity does it have a pinkish tone to it when not calibrated for it?
You can actually see the pinkish tone if you hold the sample up to natural light at an angle. So yes, I guess you could try to calibrate it out, but that seems a bit daft - introducing a problem and then trying to compensate for it!

When the NZ9 turns up (next week in theory!) I'm going to try some samples of Stewart screens before getting it calibrated.
 
That pink looks like a failed attempt to convert SDR to HDR :D
Well the projector is only SDR (been waiting to be able to afford a proper upgrade rather than just like-for-like HDR), but the tint is there anyway it seems.
 
Based on those images I too would have went for the bottom left, that said I am sure a good calibrator could allow for that pinkish tone and get it looking spot on.

Was it Slate 1.2 or 0.8 you ended up with?
0.8 - I preferred the contrast levels. 1.2 is really a bit washed out (it's the bottom right one).
 
0.8 - I preferred the contrast levels. 1.2 is really a bit washed out (it's the bottom right one).
Before getting my screen from Ricky I got him to send a sample of the regular grey to compare with the ALR samples I already had, I was quite surprised how well it did with over head spots compared to a proper ALR sample which was why I went with it. With my spots set to 2% lumen, yeah I know this sounds crazy low but you'd be surprised how much you can see my screen is perfectly acceptable to watch sports and TV shows though with movies the purist comes out in me and it's lights off.
 

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