Projection in Gallery

[boardingbob]

Hello all

 

Here's one thrown at me by my museum curator. She's planning a gallery project, which will tour to other venues, where the images are projected onto the walls rather than printed on large boards. The dozen or so images need to be 8ft high by 4ft wide and have very good resolution, reasonable brightness (the room will be dim) and have variable projection throws as low as 3m. The projectors will be ceiling mounted.

 

Now the options as I see it are

 

a) conventional profile (ie S4 Junior zoom) with keystone corrected full colour glass gobo

b) architectural profile (ie Clay Paky Display Line) with the same

c) projector with appropriate lens

 

with the problems that

 

a) will look a bit ugly in the museum

b) will only look marginally better, be horribly expensive and may not have the resolution required

c) will not like being one image constantly, may find it difficult to find suitable hardware to fit the brief

 

 

Really interested to hear others thoughts on this one. I have a vested interest in finding a conventional lighting fixture that will do the job as I'll probably get to keep them for the theatre afterwards (woo-hoo!)but the most important thing is to find something that WORKS...

[Modge]

Something from optikinetics? Solars are discreet if they're bright enough, otherwise one of the K-series projectors are brighter, but bigger and uglier. The resolution is only limited by how well printed the slides are.

[boardingbob]

The Solars look quite good, the 250 should be bright enough and it's interesting that it accepts slides as well as gobos. Theoretically they'd be cheaper and easier to re-do if the other galleries hanging positions arn't quite right. Not sure who actually prints slides anymore, but they've got to be less than a couple of hundred quid a pop!

 

Anyone recommend a good data projector?

[AHYoung]

We do lots of this kind of thing and if I was an artist id not be happy with a full colour gobo, never seen one that was anywhere need the quality required in a gallery. If you need to project, use a projector and a photographic slide or do it digitally, anything else wont cut it on quality grounds.

Dataprojectors a good idea, but its not the budget solution, and as its portrait rather than landscape whic h is a whole new discussion, you will be using both 40% of the light and pixels so will need a hi res bright unit to start with and thats going to cost.

 

The easy option would be to glass mount a photographic slide and use a solar 250. the slide will need changed occasionally, or you use a slide autochanger loaded with multiples of the same and that stops it overheating and bleaching out. Its not going to be very bright, but its cheap and reliable - im also aware of an edinburrgh based hire co with several dozen...

 

the best affordable option would be to use kodak slide projectors - An ektapro will be at least double the brightness of a solar and ther avalable lenses will allow for placement pretty much anywhere, you can also get perspective control lenses which avoid the need to pre-keystone the image. These used to be the mainstay of hi end imaging, but av companies have shelves of obsolete units as its now a didital world, therefor you should be able to either but the units cheap or hire them for next to nothing. We recently sold a 400w simda carousel which must have cost over a grand for a pound plus a vanilla slice.

 

as far as a recomendation for a dataprojector goes, Panasonic are the most commenly seen gallery units and a single chip 6000 series would be my recomendation as a robust general purpose unit either sd or hd....

 

 

Also A&M photographic in Edinburgh http://www.amimage.co.uk/ will make you a digital copy slide for a couple of quid each, much better quality than a gobo at a fraction of the cost { if you dont mind changing them}

[boardingbob]

AHYoung, that's a really useful answer, thanks very much.

 

I remember Ektapros very well, It certainly would be a cheap way of doing things....

[marktownend]

Another source for 35mm slides is wwww.digitalslides.co.uk. I've used them a few times for slides for Clay Paky VIP300s and they've been very prompt and excellent quality. Only a few pounds each.

 

Presumably the images won't be projected where people can obstruct them?!