The TecVision Engineered Screen Technology on show at ISE 2015 has, says its developer Draper, now been certified by the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) for excellent colour reproduction and fidelity.
To be certified by the ISF, a screen has to have a flat spectral response – or colour fidelity. In other words, the screen cannot affect the colour of the image enough for the human eye to perceive. Traditionally, projection screens have fooled the eye that things are brighter by using blue tints, according to ISF president and founder Joel Silver.
“The problem,” said Silver, “is if you accentuate the blue that means you aren’t getting the greens or reds you need to build a colour-accurate image. We want to take whatever the artist created and bring it to the screen with fidelity.”
“We basically tie ourselves into something called a pure white matt screen, a screen that is a reference colour,” Silver said of testing projection screens for colour performance. “Neutral white, not a hint of tint to it. The picture you get is what was it was meant to look like from the factory: not tinted.”
Currently available in six formulations, TecVision features white surfaces with gains ranging from 1.0 to 1.9 and grey surfaces that are said to have excellent performance under higher room light levels. All TecVision surfaces are also 4K ready, but what Draper claims most impressed Silver when certifying TecVision is the ability of some of the high gain surfaces to deal with ambient light while preserving colour fidelity.
“Finding the colour fidelity of high gain materials close to that of no gain materials was wonderful!” Silver said. “Gain without a price to pay is a wonderful thing. I knew from measuring luminance even without the specifications that these screens were high gain, but I wasn’t seeing the penalty of colour shift.”
