Digital screen clearer with light on

I had the ultimate movie experience recently. It was at Wellington's luxurious Embassy Theatre. I was sitting in the middle of the best row in the pitch-black and nearly-empty theatre as Ridley Scott's Crusades epic, Kingdom of Heaven, reached its bombastic climax, the siege of Jerusalem. It doesn't get much better than that.

But unless you are Peter Jackson, the likelihood of seeing every movie in that type of style is slim. Thankfully, home-theatre systems have been dropping in price by about a third a year. You can now pick up a decent home-cinema projector for $2000 to $3000, and if you're lucky, they'll throw in a free projector screen. Invest in a 5.1-channel surround stereo system and speakers and you're set for some pretty good movie viewing.

But a new line of thinking is taking hold when it comes to the best way to watch projected movies. Some in the home theatre industry, including Auckland's IceAV, shun a pitch-black room in favour of leaving the lights on.

It sounds like sacrilege, but a new generation of screens actually benefit from the presence of ambient light. IceAV's screens have a certain fabric coating that uses available lighting to brighten the image being projected onto the screen.

If you are interested in the specifics of the technology, there is a white paper on IceAV's website devoted to the topic.

By playing with the lighting settings in my lounge, I was able to experiment for myself. The projected image is actually much better with the lights on when you use IceAV's screen. Projected against a plain white wall, the image all but disappears when the lights are on.

It's sort of like the difference between looking at a laptop screen running on mains power and one running on battery. The former gives much greater brightness.

I was using a middle-of-the-road BenQ projector with IceAV's screen. Movies and Xbox games looked sharp and clear on the screen with overhead lighting switched on. The effect is similar when natural daylight is let into the room.

The advantage of IceAV's screen is that it allows the projector to be used for more general viewing. Other people in the lounge could be reading a book in perfect light while you take in a movie or some big-screen TV.

You limit the image size to the size of the screen you've purchased, but you can still pull the screen away and blast the projected image up against a wall with the lights off.

Aiming for the high end of the market, IceAV would do well to improve the styling of its products. I'd like to see a choice of colours for the casing and a nice stainless steel or brushed-metal stand. It's about home theatre after all, so it has to look the part.

But I like the idea, which is catching on among retailers wanting to target shoppers with adverts in brightly-lit shopping malls.

With some refinement, the screens could prove a hit in home theatre as well.

Review

72-inch Digital Daylight Screen with BenQ Projector
Price: $4168 for screen and projector. Other packages available.
Herald rating: 7/10