Build your own projector screen?

Buy a screen or build your own?

Many of our customers ask themselves whether it's worth buying a screen, building their own screen or simply projecting onto a white wall. Our answer is clear: "It depends!"
For the DIY enthusiast who enjoys building things, buying a screen is probably not an option, so we've written this short guide for them:

Materials list and cutting

Material costs approx. 80 euros
Time required: 7 hours
2 people

You'll need a few boards, screws, black paint, steel brackets and screen fabric by the metre. Cut the boards to the desired size, based on the width available in the room. The screen width should be about half the distance from the screen to the viewer – so if you sit 4 m away, the screen can easily be 2–2.5 m wide.

From this 2 m width, calculate the height with the following formula: width / 16 x 9. So with an image width of 200 cm, you get a height of 112.5 cm in 16:9 format. The boards cut to size are now screwed together using the brackets – for stability, it's advisable to fit a bracket on both the outside and the inside of the screen frame.

Fitting the fabric and masking

Next, attach the screen fabric by the metre to the back of the frame with a staple gun. To pull the waves out of the fabric, it's best done by 2 people. You now have a finished stretcher frame, but it doesn't yet have a black border. This border, also called masking, is extremely important for a projector's visible contrast. Without masking, the eye has no boundary between the image and the wall and therefore doesn't perceive the contrasts as strongly. In addition, a felt border absorbs stray light.

As it's too much work to glue the felt straight onto the screen fabric, we decide to blacken the screen ourselves with paint. So we draw a border about 7 cm wide on the fabric with a pencil, then apply masking tape over the line and paint the frame black with a brush. Once the paint has dried, we peel off the tape and hope the colour has dried straight and without bleeding.

Effort compared with a ready-made screen

If you don't mind the effort, you'll get an acceptable result, but it won't match a professional screen. With Maxlum fixed-frame screens, for example, the fabric can easily be re-tensioned because it isn't fixed rigidly to the frame but attached via tensionable elastic loops. Screen fabrics lose their tautness over time and usually need re-tensioning. The elastic loops do this automatically up to a certain point; after that, you have to lend a hand yourself with a few simple steps.
So everyone has to decide for themselves whether to build their own screen or buy a professional screen from a specialist retailer.

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