It’s not just the projector that’s responsible for producing sharp, contrast-rich pictures and natural colours — users often underestimate the importance of choosing the right screen.

We sampled a number of projection screens, including the Davision Cadre No.1, pictured here.

Time and time again, home-cinema fans buy an expensive projector, point it at a white wall, and expect perfect results. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that something isn’t right — and a bit of research is sure to bring up the topic of projector screens.

The best screens can easily cost as much as the projector itself or, in some cases, even more — but, faced with these mounting costs, many people will question whether their home cinema really needs a proper screen. Televisions.com set about answering this question, but our tests quickly showed that it’s hard to come up with a definitive response. As is so often the case, it depends on a number of factors.

Testing takes place in our darkened test theatre.

A small example from the test lab: We were surprised to see a lack of subjective resolution in our very first 1080p test, on a Stewart Filmscreen GrayHawk RS — which has served as our reference screen for many years. Based in California, manufacturer Stewart Filmscreen is known for its high-quality screens and, thanks to outstandingly neutral colours, can count even Hollywood studios among its customers.

During our test, structures appeared in the picture that were almost as big as the individual pixels — or even bigger. These structures looked particularly unpleasant during camera pans and in homogenous areas of the picture, where they were often highly visible and even led to the loss of fine details. We immediately got in touch with Stewart Filmscreen and American video-expert Joe Kane (the so-called “video pope”), who took part in developing the GrayHawk RS.

They’d had similar reports from companies around the world, and it quickly became clear that their screens would need a finer structure in order to display a good 1080p picture. The engineers at Stewart took the criticism on board and began developing a solution. Since early 2008, the Californian company has been producing new screens specially tailored to 1080p projection.

Since then, a newer model has appeared: the JKP Affinity from American manufacturer Da-Lite. This was also optimised by Joe Kane and is now a permanent part of our test procedures, since its pictures are more natural and unadulterated than those of any other screen.

What should a screen offer?

In setting our quality criteria for projector screens, we considered all possible circumstances. A perfect screen should:

• suppress the effect of ambient illumination without sacrificing too much brightness,
• offer neutral colours at every viewing angle,
• meet the requirements of a 1080p projector,
• be simple to install and built to high standards.

We pay particular attention to the problem we described above, the poor subjective resolution, and check whether screens produce the same irritating effects.