Screen Innovations: Visage Hi-Contrast Screen2

I have also provided a shot of the room, to give you an idea of the ambient light present. This was taken on a bright sunny day, with light pouring in from two glass doors. The room in these pictures is more than bright enough for almost any activity. Other photos make the room look darker, so the image on the screen can be seen the way I see it. (If the room is properly exposed, then the screen is so overexposed, the image is almost completely whited out.

In my office, I placed the Screen Innovations Visage partially in front of a Carada screen with a gain of 1.4, in otherwords, even the Carada is a bright screen. For the first picture, there is plenty of light in the room coming from overhead (four recessed lights), plus some coming from the left side open french doors.

Perhaps the image directly below gives you the best indication, the Visage (left) looks pretty good, you can see details in the wall behind, the blues and golds are much richer, etc. If you were to hold your fingers in front of the Firehawk area, you’ld realize how good the Visage looks.

The last image, below (the closeup), though, has the overhead lights turned off, but the shades on the window, that is right behind the projector, are full open. Now the Visage washes out even more than the other screen.

So – the trick to putting the Visage to good use, is to NOT have your light sources(except the projector, of course), straight back from the screen.

Commercial applications

The Visage is probably just what a lot of boardrooms, conference rooms and training rooms can really use. And that’s not to mention tradeshow displays, as tradeshow floors are usually extremely bright places.

Of course, commercial projectors, even inexpensive ones are significantly brighter than home theater projectors.

If you have a room with a lot of side ambient light from windows, or overhead lighting like florescents, very close to the screen, the Visage, in conjunction with a good business projector will provide a much better image than a traditional screen. In other words, you might get very good results with a basic 2000 lumen”portable” projector ($1000 – $1500), instead of paying several thousand more dollars for a 5000 lumen projector which probably has a ton of extra features you don’t need.

Other Trade-offs.

Like other high gain screens, the Visage does have a weakness in that, the image brightness rolls off to the sides (as well as non-ideal, vertical viewing angles).

All screens with significant gain, do have this issue. Basically, as long as the off angle viewing isn’t too great, a high gain screen will work fine.