[basementjack]

Thanks everyone for all the ideas here.

I've wanted a new screen for a while - I had a pull down 4:3 da-lite that I paid $330 for - and after a few years of use a few things had changed - I had sold the old projector and gotten a 16x9, and I started noticing that the pull down dalite wasn't perfectly flat - it had some gentle ripples.

Neither of these were show stoppers and I've enjoyed my setup - but in the back of my mind - a new screen was on my upgrade radar. I had figured that a new screen would run me $600-$900 - as such it wasn't something I thought I'd do anytime soon.

Then I started reading about DIY screens -

There were several options that looked really appealing, and best of all, none of them seemed very expensive - I think the most I could have spent was $250 if I went all out.

I started reading up and getting samples of the Wilsonart Laminates thanks to WBassett, Mechman, and others hear at the shack.

Wanting it to be absolutely perfect, I started thinking of exactly how I wanted my screen - how big, what kind of border, how to mount the laminate, etc...

Not sure if anyone can relate, but for these kinds of things, I can get pretty caught up in the "ultimate design" and can easily spend a lot of time before commiting to build something.

Then one day I read a post about someone who built a simple frame with 1x4's and used some black out cloth from jo-annes to make a screen for under $99.

That really caught my attention, and I felt, that for under $99, I could build one of those now - even if I replaced it later with a better design.

Immediate benefits are that I no longer have any ripples, and I have a very nice 3 1/2 inch velvet covered border (my old 4x3 was a pull down - black spray painted border)

I decided on a 2.4:1 screen, and picked 50x120 - I liked the size, and the math works out to nice even numbers - easy to measure and cut.

I'll be using the screen 2 ways - for 2.4:1 movies, I zoom my projector so the movie perfectly fits in the 50x120 the frame. For 16x9 sources, I zoom the projector back in so that the image is 50x89.

For the final phase of my "build", I bought some of that pink foam board from home depot, and cut out 2 panels of roughly 50x15.5 each, and will cover them with velvet - to mask the screen down to 16x9.

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So far I am thrilled with the results - We watched Harry Potter (2.4:1) and it really had a nice movie theater feel to it - The black velvet does a great job of absorbing the spillover light from the projector and you're really not aware that the projector has been zoomed. It's a much better feeling than watching it on a 16x9 with black bars at the top and bottom.

Playing xbox in the 50x89 area is also great - I had experimented with different screen sizes (thinking bigger would be better) what I found was, I played much better in the games when the screen size was big, but not huge - too small a screen and the detail was hard to see - too big a screen and there was too much to take in without moving the eyes back and forth.

- Jack