Bubby4j
Active Member
I'm trying to determine how bright of a projector we need in our church's auditorium.
Right now we have 2 Panasonic PT-DW5000U projectors per screen with the image from each projector stacked on the other (we have 2 screens). Each projector is supposed to be 4,500 lumens so we'd have a theoretical brightness of 9,000 lumens per screen.
The screens are about 220" diagonal (16:9 or 16:10), and I think they're Da Lite Tensioned Large Cosmopolitan Electrol screens. I'm not sure what the surface gain is, though I'd guess it's either 0.9 or 1.0. It appears white and not a high contrast gray.
This gives a surface area of roughly 144 square ft.
The projectors are ceiling mounted somewhere around 25ft from the screens. If we got new projectors we could mount them at whatever distance is best, though I think the distance they're at now is pretty good.
The problem we have is that the image quality isn't all that good, and they're not bright enough unless we have most of the lights off. Video is particularly problematic, text is okayish. The lower portion of our stage is wood, and it likes to bounce the stage lighting onto the screens a little bit.
TL;DR
I need to figure out what the ambient lighting on the screen is like in order to properly find out how many lumens we need. To do that I need a light meter, but the decent ones seem expensive ($200 ish).
Is there a place I could rent a light meter for a day, either online or in North Texas?
Right now my feeling is that we need somewhere between 6-10k lumens per screen, depending on the ambient light.
Right now we have 2 Panasonic PT-DW5000U projectors per screen with the image from each projector stacked on the other (we have 2 screens). Each projector is supposed to be 4,500 lumens so we'd have a theoretical brightness of 9,000 lumens per screen.
The screens are about 220" diagonal (16:9 or 16:10), and I think they're Da Lite Tensioned Large Cosmopolitan Electrol screens. I'm not sure what the surface gain is, though I'd guess it's either 0.9 or 1.0. It appears white and not a high contrast gray.
This gives a surface area of roughly 144 square ft.
The projectors are ceiling mounted somewhere around 25ft from the screens. If we got new projectors we could mount them at whatever distance is best, though I think the distance they're at now is pretty good.
The problem we have is that the image quality isn't all that good, and they're not bright enough unless we have most of the lights off. Video is particularly problematic, text is okayish. The lower portion of our stage is wood, and it likes to bounce the stage lighting onto the screens a little bit.
TL;DR
I need to figure out what the ambient lighting on the screen is like in order to properly find out how many lumens we need. To do that I need a light meter, but the decent ones seem expensive ($200 ish).
Is there a place I could rent a light meter for a day, either online or in North Texas?
Right now my feeling is that we need somewhere between 6-10k lumens per screen, depending on the ambient light.