An Academy Award Winning Screen In Your Home Theater - With Stewart!
Written: Aug 24 '03 (Updated Nov 02 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fantastic picture, straightforward assembly, the best screen for DLP projection.
Cons: Price, 4-6 week wait time after ordering, requires 2 people to install.
The Bottom Line: Stewart is the premium film screen manufacturer. Their screens are expensive, but are of the highest quality, and are amazing for watching movies!
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| mrs-j's Full Review: Stewart Luxus Deluxe ScreenWall 100'' FireHawk HDT... |
Introduction
When my husband and I envisioned our home theater, we envisioned an enormous theater screen, with recessed lights shining onto it giving the Whaaaaaah! effect, as we call it. (Imagine heavenly voices singing, it's kind of fun!)
We had selected our projector, the InFocus X1. With our projector chosen, we set about selecting the best screen for it. We looked around at various screens, Da-Lite and others. And what we quickly discovered is that Stewart sets the standard for film screen quality.
They are, however, expensive. Because our DLP projector is an entry-level model, and was entry-level priced at $999, we originally balked at buying a Stewart. The main reason? Because the Stewart screen we wanted, the Luxus Deluxe ScreenWall FireHawk screen, cost almost $500 more than the projector itself!
However, after doing a great deal of research, we decided to buy the best screen money could buy, and keep our low-end projector for a few reasons. First, the projector can easily be upgraded to a higher-end model in a few years. Prices on projectors are falling fairly rapidly as improvements in technology make home theater projectors more readily available to the average consumer. Second, the FireHawk screen is designed to be used with DLP projectors and helps eliminate some of the flaws that DLP projectors inherently have. And third, screen technology is much more static, and film screens don't seem to have the steep drops in price that projectors do.
So the Stewart Luxus Deluxe ScreenWall it was, for our 100" movie screen!
The History Behind the Stewart Name
Stewart screens are renowned for their quality. Since 1947 they have been making screens for command and control centers, simulators and large theaters as well as home users. Their screens have even won academy awards!
Stewart doesn't just passively manufacture screens, they actively engineer screens for optimal viewing. This is why they are so amazing. When DLP (Digital Light Processing) technology came out from Texas Instruments, Stewart set about adapting a film screen to enhance the picture that DLP provides.
Stewart Technology - The GreyHawk and FireHawk
They've developed two interesting screen fabrics, the GreyHawk and the FireHawk. Both screen fabrics are actually silver-grey in color, not the white that you're used to seeing in movie theaters, or on regular screens. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "silver screen".
The GreyHawk has a negative gain of .95 (Gain is the measure of light actually reflected back from the screen). The negative gain provides deeper and more inky blacks, and is well-suited for low light. However, the FireHawk has a slightly higher gain of 1.35 while still maintaining the advantages of the grey screen material and the deeper black levels.
We chose the FireHawk because we felt that our projector needed a screen with a slightly higher, positive gain. The FireHawk's features, as listed by Stewart, are:
- DLP Ready (Just a fancy term to let you know it works well with DLP)
- Ambient Light Resistance (Useful if you have any light leakage into your home theater)
- Increases Black Level (Inkier blacks than with a regular screen)
- Increases Color Saturation (Deeper, more vibrant colors)
- Bright, Vibrant Image (The additional gain adds brightness and 'life' to movie images)
- Washable (Heaven help us if we ever have to wash it, though. Mr. J will have a fit.)
- Flame Retardant
The technical specifications for the FireHawk screen material are:
Perforations: N/A
Framing And Design: Available in fixed (Such as the ScreenWall design) or motorized designs
Masking: Available (This is included with the ScreenWall, which comes with a black, velvet-flocked masking fabric)
Gain: 1.35
Half Gain Viewing: 28 degrees
Viewing Angle: 100 degrees
Ordering The Screen
You cannot order a Stewart screen straight from the manufacturer. You have to go through a reseller for it. They provide a list of resellers on their website. We opted to go to our local Myer-Emco to order the screen. The manager at this Myer-Emco has helped me pick out several components for my house over the past five years and has always been tremendously helpful. He never oversells, and he never recommends things just to make a high-end sale.
He was surprised and impressed when we showed up to ask him to order our Stewart Luxus Deluxe Screenwall for us. We had done all of our research and didn't need any information from him. We just needed the ordering tool on his computer - which he was happy to show us. Stewart provides their resellers with a customized ordering interface through their web site.
Every order that Stewart receives is custom-made. They don't just have a pile of screens waiting to ship out. When Stewart builds your screen, they give it a serial number and they even keep a sample of the very fabric from which they make your screen on file with that serial number so that if you ever call them with a defect or problem with your screen, they can look at it for reference.
Scott, our Myer-Emco friend, ordered the screen for us and printed out two things: A receipt, and installation instructions. We asked him if we should hire his company to come out and install the screen. "Nah," he said. "A few beers and some patience and you can have this baby up in no time."
We went home excited, with our receipt and our instructions and waited.
Four weeks later, Scott called us. Stewart had notified him that our screen had been completed and was being shipped to him. Two days later, he had it in the store and we went to pick it up.
Unpacking and Installing the Screen
We brought home the rather long box which housed the screen and opened it up. Stewart packs their screens rather seriously. All of the components of the frame had been packed in foam and sealed. We pulled everything out, including an another set of installation instructions, from the box.
First, we assembled the frame. This took very little time and Mr. J did it mostly on his own. Then we mounted the frame on the wall in our home theater. We used a combination of math and voodoo to get it directly center and perfectly aligned on the wall. Finally, using the hardware supplied by Stewart, Mr. J hung the expandable bolts behind the dry wall, and we were ready to lift the frame onto the wall and screw it in completely in its permanent home.
We stood back and admired the frame.
Then we took the frame off its mount, which is simple enough to do. You merely unscrew it in two places at the top and bottom of the mount. The mount remained on the wall, but we put the frame on the floor, back end facing up, so that we could install the screen into it.
The screen was also lovingly packed into the box. It was rolled up around a cardboard tube in a light sheet of foam, and then wrapped with paper and sealed with heavy duty tape at both ends and in the middle.
We unrolled the screen and, no matter how much you hear it in the marketing materials, gasped in surprised as a smoky, silver-grey screen faced us. "It's not white," I said, stupidly. "Wild."
The edges of the screen have snaps on them. You align the screen inside the frame and quite literally snap it into place along the back of the frame. It just couldn't be easier, especially when you have your husband pulling taut on the really hard-to-snap snaps! When we were done snapping the screen into place, we lifted the frame back up and then attached it back to the wall mount.
This was definitely a job for two people, not because it was arduous, but because the screen and frame were unwieldy.
I stood back and for the first time surveyed our new screen, mounted on the wall, in all of it's silver-grey glory.
I could have sworn I heard that heavenly choral music.
Using the Screen
We quickly cleaned up the home theater, shuffling boxes and paper and foam wrapping out into the other room. I grabbed two bottles of beer from the refrigerator while Mr. J set up our standard "test" DVD for viewing: "Apollo 13".
We dimmed the lights and sat down.
If you read my review of the InFocus X1, you might recall reading that I giggled like a schoolgirl when we fired up the projector and I saw our first home theater showing ever (of "Apollo 13" of course) on just a plain wall painted with a coat of builder's white paint.
This time around, I giggled more. We popped in DVD after DVD, all of the standards that we watched when we first got the projector, skipping around to our favorite, most intense, chapters. "American Beauty", "Titanic", "Apollo 13", "Nightmare Before Christmas". We watched them all, in awe.
As great as the projector was on a plain white wall, we never understood how good the picture could be on a perfect film screen. The blacks are dark, dark black. The contrast is fantastic. Colors are vividly bright. There is no hint of bleeding anywhere in the picture.
We even projected different ratios onto the screen, so that we got "black bars" on the sides and bottom at times. The Stewart FireHawk screen is so well-engineered that you almost don't need to mask for non-native image ratios! You barely even notice that there are black bars there at all, it blends in so well and is so dark.
I also noticed that I could watch movies longer on this screen, with less eyestrain, than when we had it projected up on a builder's white wall.
The picture on the movie screen is amazing. There are fewer artifacts. The edges of objects are clearer. Everything is improved dramatically with this screen. It is well worth the investment.
Summary
We love this screen. It completes our theater and makes the room look fantastic, whether a movie is being projected on it or not! Everything in our home theater will likely be upgraded as newer technology comes out, except for the Stewart film screen.
InFocus X1 Review: http://www.epinions.com/content_106342682244
Stewart Film Screen Corporation: http://www.stewartfilm.com
E-Mail: comments@stewartfilm.com
Phone: (310) 784-5300
A photo of the screen installed is on my profile page and is also up at http://members.cox.net/mrs.j/screen.jpg
Recommended:
Yes
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mrs-j
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"Man was made for something better than disturbing dirt." - Oscar Wilde
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