Guide to the Flex-Theater Entertainment in the luxury living room
Jennifer Davis Vice President of Marketing, Runco
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Table of Contents • Introduction to Projection in the Home • The Benefits of Front Projection • An Unfair Fight • The Flex-Theater Solution • Flex-Theater Design and Room Adjustments • Summary
Photo courtesy of Stewart Filmscreen. Room features the new Couture Collection. Flex-Theater Guide from Runco International
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Introduction
Projection Possibilities In this eBook, we explore the possibilities for front projection in rooms throughout the home, not just in dedicated “home theaters.” The concept of using one room for a variety of purposes and then having it transformed into a Flex-Theater will be discussed. Front projection is no longer just limited to dark “caves,” but can be brought to light.
“It’s a unfair fight against the sun, but it can be won with smart design.” -Jennifer Davis
As the Vice President of Marketing for Runco International, a leader in home theater and video technologies, Ms. Jennifer Davis has unique insights to what luxury homeowners should be looking for and what can be accomplished with video technology in the luxury home. You will find more information about Jennifer at the Author page toward the end of this book. Photo courtesy of Gramophone
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The Benefits of Front Projection #1: The Big Screen Experience
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s a projector. Home theater enthusiasts have known for decades how impressive front projection entertainment systems can be. They are the dominant technology in commercial cinemas for good reasons and many of these translate into residential applications. So, why consider projection for your home? The first benefit is that you can create a big screen experience at home. While plasma displays top out at around 150” and single LCD TVs over 70” are rare, projection systems are virtually unlimited in size and at a lower cost per square foot of display. You can create screens measured not in inches diagonal, but in feet or meters wide, which translates into more compelling entertainment.
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The Benefits of Front Projection #2: Design Flexibility
Now you see it. Now you don’t. The second reason to consider front projection in the home is that it fits your lifestyle and blends seamlessly with your décor. You can hide the electronics away and with a touch of a button bring a home theater to life, without having to leave the room. Plus, there is no thinner flat panel display than a front projection screen. Projectors are available in a wide range of sizes, industrial design styles, and personalization that allow the product to be customized to the homeowner’s personality and passions.
Photo by Audio Video Planners
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The Benefits of Front Projection #3: Unmatched Image Performance
Image Performance Like No Other
1.78:1 HD content on a 1.78:1 Screen
Runco offers both flat panels and projection, yet our projection line-up offers performance beyond what is possible with flat panel displays.
From color performance to black levels, in the right environment, projection dominates. Plus, you are not limited to a fixed aspect ratio of 16:9 high definition (which is a 1.781 aspect ratio). You can watch CinemaScope 2.35:1 content without black bars using Runco’s CineWide® and CineGlide™ technology.
2.35:1 scope content on a 1.78:1 HD screen
All things you can not do on a flat panel.
1.78:1 HD content on a 21:9 screen
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The Benefits of Front Projection #4: 3D Done Right
3D done right The market excitement around 3D in the home is palpable and there is no better way to watch 3D than with projection. The big screen experience is more immersive and it enables Runco’s Constant Stereoscopic Video™ (CSV) with batteryfree passive glasses for the best-in-class 3D performance.
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The Benefits of Front Projection #5: Energy Efficient
It’s Not Easy Being Green Using power-consumption-per-square-inch calculations, projectors use a fraction of the energy of large flat panel displays. This is especially true of Runco’s InfiniLight™ lampless LED illumination (available on the QuantumColor™ series and the 3Dimension™ D-73d).
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The Drawbacks to Front Projection
Why doesn’t everyone have a theater? With all the style, performance, and cost benefits of front projection, why doesn’t every home in the world have a theater as their primary entertainment display? First off, projection is seen as relatively complicated (as opposed to a buy-and-hang flat panel display, which is often a do-it-yourself project for the homeowner). This leads to people believing it to be wildly expensive, overly complex, or not even considering it as a possibility at all. Indeed, most people simply don’t think of front projection as a viable option when shopping for a “television.” The second reason is people associate projectors with dark, cave-like rooms that can only be used for movie watching. Sometimes space, room size, or ceiling height limitations can make homeowners believe that projection will never work for them.
Once the homeowner considers projection, then the real work begins of making it work for their room.
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An Unfair Fight
Just Look What We’re Up Against Projection only works when the light on the screen is brighter than the brightness of the room. In other words, the “blackest” blacks of the scenes you show, will only be as dark as the screen before you turn on the projector and in many bright rooms that is simply not dark enough for acceptable viewing. Make no mistake, projection is not the best solution for every room.
LS-10i shown with an optional FinishPalette™ NCAA® team logo design. Subject to approvals.
You see, fighting the sun is an unfair fight. While projectors may be 200-400 watts, the sun has the equivalent of 380,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts (yes, that is 25 zeros). The industry standards for theater brightness call for approximately 14 foot lamberts (fL) of luminance off the screen, the sun delivers a whopping 10,000 fL! Exactly the kind of power you’d expect from a light source that sustains life on Earth. And there is no projector in the world, at any price, that can do that!
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Guerilla Warfare
Projector
Outsmarting the Sun
Screen
Sun
Although we can’t beat the sun, but we can outsmart it with intelligent choices and exceptional room designs. Projection is a solution more should seriously consider. A design starts with an understanding that the projector plus the screen you choose to shine it on (and we highly recommend a professional screen over just shining the projector on a wall) can achieve radically different performance in different room conditions. In the coming pages, we’ll discuss this in more detail.
Room Condition
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The Flex-Theater
Flexible, Fashionable, and Impressive One of the ways to beat the sun and create incredible visual experiences in the home is with a flex-theater. When you can’t dedicate the space or the budget for a dedicated home theater, a flexible design that accommodates multiple uses of a single space can be a perfect compromise. A projection system combined with modular furniture and lighting control can transform a living room into a theater back into an entertainment space with a simple tap on a touchscreen.
Photo courtesy of Stewart Filmscreen
We recommend a flex-theater that contemplates the viewing patterns, needs, decorating sensibilities, and budget of the homeowner and is tuned especially to their needs. One size does not have to fit all, as each projection solution can be unique. In order to do this, the room designer or installer must start with an assessment of the room itself.
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Assessing the Room
Contrast Ratios Rule Before we dive into room design principles, we would be remiss not to mention the importance of working with an experienced partner to design and install your room. Everything we will discuss here is a fraction of the resources and expertise one of our authorized Runco dealers will bring to your project. We explain it here only to give you a framework to discuss with your audio/video partner. In designing for front projection, contrast ratio is one of the most important measurements. And the best possible contrast ratio achieved in any room is when the projector is off (the blacks are at their darkest) as compared to the projector is full-on with a white image (when the whites are at their brightest). This calculation forms the parameters for product selection. And, if the estimated results are still not acceptable, there are a host of things you can do to adjust the room for better performance, repeating the calculation until the optimum results are achieved.
Step 1: Measure blank screen
Step 2: Estimate white image
Step 4: Adjust room
Step 3: Calculate best case contrast ratio
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Designing for Day Parts
When Do You Watch
Morning
Night
Noon
The same room can perform very differently at different times of the day. In the morning, while you are drinking coffee and watching the news, the sun might be off-angle and the ambient light manageable, but by lunchtime the sun glare is making your display of any type nearly unreadable. Fast forward to dusk or night and the sky is dark and the curtains are drawn and your room is perfectly suited for a traditional home theater projection solution.
Dusk
This is why is important to consider your viewing habits and when you want to use your new system. Once you do that, you can do the previous calculation on “best case” contrast ratio and if you don’t like the results you can adjust the room and repeat the calculation.
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Adjustment Possibilities #1: Screens The Screen is What You See There are so many things one can do to improve the fundamentals of a flex-theater for better performance. The first place to look is the screen. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the screen, the more concentrated the light, and the brighter the resulting image. So, generally you want a smaller screen in a flex-theater than you might enjoy in a dedicated theater. But never fear, it will still be larger than the equivalently priced flat panel display.
“Screen size calculations are like spreading peanut butter on bread. The bigger the sandwich, the thinner the peanut butter.� -Jeremy Sternhagen
The second thing to consider is screen materials. Some are designed to preserve contrast in bright environments (typically they have a gray tint) or to reject ambient light. This is another area, where a trusted installer and system designer can help with material selection.
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Adjustment Possibilities #2: Window Coverings
Block the Enemy Out If you are fighting with the sun, one way to win is to block out the light with curtains or window coverings. Even a partial window covering can make a big difference. Depending on the screen material, you might close a curtain close to the screen (while keeping all others open) to create enough of a shadow on the screen surface to protect your contrast. When using a screen with gain (which focuses and reflects best the light coming from the particular direction of the projector while rejecting all others), sometimes you need to block the light coming from the window closest to the projector.
Photo courtesy of Stewart Filmscreen
Plus, there are fantastic window covering products available that can be triggered by remote control (the same control system that turns on your projector) to make these adjustments automatic. In any case, the projection doesn’t necessarily require an entirely dark room. Thoughtful room design and screen and projector placement can make a big difference. Flex-Theater Guide from Runco International
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Adjustment Possibilities #3: Wall and Ceiling Color
Beware the Reflections Light can bounce off ceilings and walls to brighten the room overall. This is why ceilings are most often white, as people want to reflect and retain as much natural light as possible. However, interior designers advise you to use that fifth wall (your ceiling) to help create a mood. In a room intended primarily for entertainment purposes, a dark ceiling can create a feeling of intimacy and also cut down on light reflections that might compete with your projection system. Judicious use of wall color or wall coverings can also make a big difference. Even a single wall painted a darker shade can add instant pizzazz to your dÊcor and dramatically improve the contrast of your projector. Today’s modern wall coverings that use lightabsorbing velvet designs can also be useful in this regard.
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Adjustment Possibilities #4: Lighting Design
Beyond the Switch Today’s home has so many lighting options and the use of dimmer switches alone saves homeowner’s hundreds a year in energy costs. But, those dimmer switches play another important role and help you manage the ambient light in your flex-theater. It is not uncommon for a family room or media room to be adjacent to other spaces in the home, like the kitchen. Instead of all overhead lighting in the kitchen, you might consider downward-facing task lighting or pendant lighting to reduce the glare coming from one room into another. This type of task lighting is recommended by kitchen designers for aesthetic appeal and safety as well.
Flex-Theater Guide from Runco International
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Adjustment Possibilities #5: Senses and Settings
Smart Control When designing for a mixed use scenario when the projector can be used in different lighting environments and different times of day, there are lots of way to integrate home automation systems to assist with optimizing the picture. Runco projectors, for instance, come pre-programmed with ISF™ Day and ISF Night settings, which can be triggered either by the homeowner, or a clock, or an ambient light sensor set up in the room to adjust automatically.
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Adjustment Possibilities #6: Content and Use Models
Not Only When You Watch, But What You Watch We started this section talking about day parts and that the needs of the homeowner at different times of the day having a huge impact on room design. The same is true of the content you watch. Brighter content performs better in brighter rooms, as there is less of the images on the screen that approach the “black” of the ambient environment. So, as a result watching bright sports footage (typically shot outside in the day time or under bright stadium lights) is a great choice for a flex-theater. The same is true of most broadcast content and news footage. In contrast, watching “The Dark Knight” or other cinema content, which was designed for viewing in dark theaters, typically requires more lighting control. So, again, if your usage model is the morning news, followed by night movie watching, a flex-theater will be an exceptional choice. Even if you want to slip a mid-day Super Bowl party into the mix every year, the performance can be great.
Images courtesy of The Weather Channel, Fox, and James Cameron and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Paramount Pictures
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The Flex-Theater (Combination Systems)
Best of Both Worlds We have seen the growth of combination systems, where a high-quality flat panel display, like a Runco display with OPAL™ technology is used for daytime viewing and a drop-down screen and projector come to life in the evening for movie watching. This can be a great combination of technologies that achieves optimum performance throughout the day and with a mix of content options.
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Summary
In conclusion, there are many different factors that combine to create a great flex-theater. In short, there are many levers to pull that create the optimum mix. Like the faders on your stereo equalizer or a professional studio mixing board, the choices are endless and the results can be incredible. Now that you see how projection might be a possibility in your home, we highly recommend you contact a Runco authorized dealer in your community to assess your room and create a plan. Your room is different from any other and the dealer can tailor a solution to your viewing preferences, decorating style, and budget to create a system unlike anything you thought was possible – A flexible entertainment and entertaining space that is magical!
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About the Author
Jennifer Davis Vice President, Marketing Ms. Davis is an experienced executive with more than 16 years of experience in display technologies, software, and Internet services. She has held leadership positions at companies ranging from a small software start up to Intel, a Fortune 50 technology firm. She joined Planar Systems in 1998 and has held operational, marketing, and strategic roles. Jennifer graduated summa cum laude from Warner Pacific College with degrees in business and history and holds a Master’s of Business Administration from Pepperdine University. A self-described geek with a belief that technology “with a point” can be a powerful part of people’s lives, she is proud to provide leadership to Runco’s product planning and marketing efforts. For further information on Runco’s industry-leading video technology, please visit www.runco.com.
Special thanks to Bob Williams, Runco’s chief architect and Ben Clifton, Runco’s VP of technology who contributed to this effort.
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Additional Information
Runco is a leading provider of premium video products for home theater and entertainment. Our expansive product line includes award-winning projection solutions, plasma and LCD flat-panel displays, as well as innovative product categories such as display walls and video processors. Please visit us at www.runco.com where you can learn more about Runco’s video solutions that create an incomparable video experiences in 2D and 3D, as well as to locate an authorized dealer near you, read our blog, and see a gallery of installations that might be useful to your own planning and design efforts.
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Authorized Dealer Profile: Rolling Thunder Group Inc.
Rolling Thunder has been creating custom lifestyle and dedicated home theater systems since 1986. With a long history of high end audio and video integration, Rolling Thunder high performance systems are recognized for their artful design and integration with outstanding attention to detail. Honors: - Gold Medal Winner 2009 Electronic Home Magazine Best Media Room - 4x nominated 2010 Project of the Year including Best Theater and Best Green Home - Voted Best Home Theater by local residents in the SF Bay Area's Marin County
Rolling Thunder Group, Inc. 3241 Kerner Blvd San Rafael, CA 94901 415.456.1681 www.rollingthundergroup.com Jeff Symonds jeff@rollingthundergroup.com
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