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Elite Home2 Acoustic Projection Screen: Image Quality

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Art Feierman

I was actually impressed with the color accuracy of this Elite screen. As you may know, I use a 106 inch Carada screen, with the Brilliant White surface (which Carada rates at 1.4 gain), as my standard screen, in my testing room. The Carada is noted for having an excellent, color neutral surface, which in general performance, is considered similar to Stewarts Studiotek 130, considered by many, to be the reference standard. To compare the abilities of the Elite screen's surface, to the Carada's, one thing I did was to partially lower the Elite screen so that images would end up half on the Elite screen, and half on the Carada. The image immediately below is a test pattern of primary and secondary colors - and white, from one of my test discs.

The black line you see running between the upper colors and the lower ones, is actually the bottom structure of the Elite screen. Therefore, the colors above the black bar, are those shining off the Elite, and the ones below the bar, are coming off of the Carada. As you can see from the image, each of the colors are almost identical. Using Photshop, I looked at the actual color composition (RGB) of each of the colors. I found overall, the Elite screen suffers a very, very slight shift to yellow/green in several of the colors, and overall (although the white itself measures a touch blue). The assumption here, is that the Carada is excellent in terms of color accuracy, and the Elite not far from the Carada's performance.

The next image is another "split screen" with the Elite on top, and the Carada below. Since you are seeing different portions of the same image, it's a bit hard to truly ascertain how close to identical these two screens are. For that reason, the second image is the same frame, shown only on the Elite. You can now see the bottom of the face, and the tunic of our subject, on the Elite. Between the two photos, you can now see the same lower portion of the image on each screen:

Unfortunately, there is a slight shift in the exposure between the two images, as well as different cropping.

Overall, the gain of the Elite is slightly lower than the Carada's and I estimate that to be a something more than 10 percent lower. That makes this Elite screen something close to the 0.9 gain spec Elite Screens provided. I reviewed the Carada, I estimated a true gain of about 1.1. (The operative term here is estimated.) In the images, the gain looks closer due to light passing through the Elite, bouncing off of the white surface behind, and coming back out of the screen, through the weaved material. This wil be discussed further, below.

That means the Elite Home2 Accoustic Screen is still fairly bright. It definitely is much brighter than the typical High Contrast Gray (non-acoustic surface).

One last "split-screen" image, for our consideration (note - these images are from House of the Flying Daggers, on Blu-ray disc):

Again, it is very hard to detect any color shift between the two screen surfaces.

The Acoustic Surface

There are several issues to be considered with an acoustic surface:

1. Acoustic projector screen properties: Passing of high frequencies

2. Acoustic projector screen properties: Overall sound level

3. Visual projector screen properties: Light interference from reflections off of back wall

4. Visual projector screen properties: Screen texture relating to screen door effect, visible surface.

Elite Screen: Passing Audio High Frequencies

Although I do not have speakers mounted behind the screen, there was sufficient space behind the screen to put a small iPod speaker system with good high and mid-frequency sound. In listening to the speakers, first, behind the projector screen surface, and then in front of it, I was able to determine that there is a definite, but not great loss of high frequencies. Instruments like cymbals lose their crispness.

If you are big on music listening, in addition to movies, as I am (I spend a lot of time watching/listening to music DVDs), then understand that you are giving up something by going to this acoustic surface. Unfortunately I don't have a good reference as to whether this Elite Screens' surface is better or worse than most other acoustic surface, in terms of loss of frequency. If, on the other hand, you are into primarily video, and the movie effects types of sound (think action film), then you probably won't care about a slight loss in the highs.

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