Projected banners

[Rajchumberis]

Hey

 

Wondering if there are any projectors that project a narrow area?! In just thinking of ideas at the moment but would ideally like these banners to be 3m tall and 50cm wide. Is this possible?! Or are led screens the only option?!

 

Tha is in advance.

[Dj Dunc]

Just use a normal projector, and mask the unwanted portions of the image, either by doing it in software (which will give a grey light on the other areas) or create a physical shutter for the projector.

[jason5d]

We would use a wide screen projector on it's side.

Only a few projectors can operate on their side

[AHYoung]

Ive done this, but with 3m / 1m banners, we used mirror frames to convert the landscape image into portrait and all the content was pre-rotated and masked. The biggest problem will simply be the fact that you throw away so much of the projected image and therefor light. if you just mask a 4:3 image, you will only be using 12% of the available light or .5m of a 4m wide image, so its simply not going to be that bright. If you go portrait rather than landscape, you almost double the output, if you want to do this without mirror frames or a very expensive projector, look at the casio led range, as these are about the only affordable units to do portrait.

[rgye]

At 3m x 0.5m your banners are very long and thin in comparison with a projected image, even from a 16:9 projector on edge/mirrored, so you will still be wasting a lot of the light output through masking. You could improve the situation by adding an anamorphic lens to stretch the long dimension - they often come up on ebay.

[sleepytom]

Your not losing light / brightness really.

 

each pixel will be the same brightness as an equivalent sized video format projection (eg if your happy with a 4000 lumen projector doing a 3x2 meter image then you'll be happy with the same projector doing a 3x0.5 meter image, as each of the pixels will be the same brightness)

 

the main issue is resolution. an XGA projector will effectively give you 1024x192 pixels which is not very good if your wanting fairly small text at a decent quality.

 

I have never seen an anamorphic lens for a video projector, perhaps Rgye could post a link to such a lens?

 

If you have the budget for LED then have a look at Christie Micro Tiles - they are far superior to LED screens in terms of resolution and would make an ideal basis for a banner type install with a close viewing distance.

[rgye]

Agreed you are not 'losing' brightness but are wasting light output that is projecting black. There is also the potential problem of imperfect black spilling if the system is used in a darkened environment.

 

Anamorphics seem to be used on data projectors more in the US than the UK, but there are plenty of references if you google the term. Their genesis of course lies in film, which is why they come up second hand as they may no longer be needed in cinemas that are going digital. Some manufacturers like Isco do them with mounting systems - at a price - but they are quite position-tolerant so improvised mounts are reasonably easy to produce. There are some specialists around eg Link but again I suspect you are looking at serious money.