Minimum throw distance - Stewart
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Minimum Throw Distance

Stewart Filmscreen products are application driven and venue specific. We care about each venue’s unique set of variables, and we want to help you best determine which Stewart screen material will optimally meet your needs.  

We offer minimum throw distances with our screen fabrics as a guideline to help determine which screen materials best align with each venue and with each projector. Many fabrics can do well with long throw distances. This is because lengthening the throw distance, generally beyond 1.5:1 or 1 ½ times the image width, normalizes the incident angle distribution of light hitting the projection surface. All of the projector’s light hits the screen fairly close to a 90 degree angle. This allows screens with limited viewing cones to distribute light into the viewing area with good to excellent uniformity. However, when throw distances are shorter, some fabrics furnish less than optimal uniformity into the viewing area. Extreme mismatches of short throw projection and the wrong screen fabrics with narrow viewing cones can result in hot spotting or hot banding, which may be observable by the viewing audience. 

Ultra short throw (UST) projectors, with focal lengths of 0.4:1 or lower, present the widest standard deviation of incident light angles to a screen’s surface. Stewart Filmscreen furnishes a variety of fabrics which are optimized for this challenge. We offer minimum throw distance recommendations for all of our screen fabrics to define best practices in image optimization. These fabrics will be marked in the UST column of the screen selection matrix on our website.

Our highly trained team can help you to choose the right screen material for every application. Every time.  

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