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Product Review
ezFrame AcousticPro1080
Art Feierman - ProjectorCentral.com
ezFrame Fixed Frame AcousticPro1080 Projector Screen Overview
Back last February ('08) we reviewed Elite's Home2 Series Fixed Screen with Acoustic white surface. We gave that screen
a Special Interest Award, rather than our normal Hot Product Award. This was due to certain limitations of the screen,
that limited the number of potential users. That particular weakness was the lack of a dark backing resulting in too much
light passing through the acoustic screen material, and, when a light surfaced wall is behind the screen, light reflected
back through the screen, washing out the image. The screen did work well enough, however when the wall behind the
screen is extremely dark. With white or off white walls, that screen's image was effectively ruined.
For those limitations, Elite has been on my case, for many months, to review their newer acoustic screen surface. This
new surface is called AcousticPro1080 and it comes with a black mesh backing, which solves the problem mentioned
above. It is definitely suitable for use with a light colored wall/surface behind the screen, as well, of course, as working
well with a dark surface behind the screen.
For this review Elite provided this fixed frame screen in an 84 inch diagonal, 16:9 aspect ratio version. The Elite part
number for this size is: R84WH1-A1080. Realizing that 84 inch diagonal is a smaller size than most would buy (but very
convenient for reviewing), below I list not only the info on the test screen size, but MSRP for several larger screen sizes as
well. Elite offers this screen in huge sizes if needed, even 150 inch and larger. You'll get the idea. Dealers generally sell
Elite screens with good discounts.
The frame itself is a nicely beveled light absorbing black finish, about 2.5 inches thick. There are thicker screen frames,
but this amount of border is enough to look good.
Overall, this Elite screen performed very well. Timing is such, that my main theater (which had off-white walls - unfortunately,
until last week), was finally painted to a dark rust color. I had the opportunity to work with this Elite Screen with
both light and dark wall color. It did a nice job, in both cases.
As I have mentioned in previous screen reviews, we are not really setup to measure and provide hard objective numbers
(gain, acoustic properties, viewing cone, etc. This review is therefore subjective on these topics.
To observe the acoustic properties, this screen was placed in my theater, below my Stewart Firehawk G3. Since I do not
have a center speaker that would place behind the screen surface, I simply slid my two large front speakers a little
closer together, and propped the screen frame up against the outer sides of each, allowing all the sound from the
speakers to pass through the Elite screen surface. Putting a friend to work, I had him bring the top of the screen forward
and down, moving it out of the way of the speakers, to see what differences/losses I could detect, with the screen in
front of the speakers.
The photo below, of the setup was taken before the speakers were moved closer together:
The image to the right, of James bond (Casino Royale), projected onto the
Elite screen with a calibrated Sanyo PLV-Z3000 projector. Looks good here,
looked even better "live".
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Please note, I'm an old "audiophile" with a pair of what were, pretty state of
the art conventional speakers from the early '70s (IMFs), and I still take my
audio seriously. I watched/listened to several Blu-ray based concerts with this
screen.
On the other hand, I'm definitely "an old guy" relative to the ability to hear
high frequencies. As such I can't comment on the amount of loss of
extremely high frequencies as I doubt I can still hear above 13K or 14K (in the
good old days, I could easily hear 19K). Those of you younger than I may well
detect more loss of highs than I can. That said, Elite claims only a very modest
loss of high frequencies - 2db at 20K, which if dead on, I would consider
excellent.
www.elitescreens.com/reviews