The Benefits of Front Projection

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

#1: The Big Screen Experience

Home theater enthusiasts have known for decades how impressive front projection entertainment systems can be. They are the dominant technology in commercial cinemas for good reasons and many of these translate into residential applications.

So, why consider projection for your home?

The first benefit is that you can create a big screen experience at home. While plasma displays top out at around 150” and single LCD TVs over 70” are rare, projection systems are virtually unlimited in size and at a lower cost per square foot of display. You can create screens measured not in inches diagonal, but in feet or meters wide, which translates into more compelling entertainment.

#2: Design Flexibility

The second reason to consider front projection in the home is that it fits your lifestyle and blends seamlessly with your décor. You can hide the electronics away and with a touch of a button bring a home theater to life, without having to leave the room.

There is also no thinner flat panel display than a front projection screen. Projectors are available in a wide range of sizes, industrial design styles, and personalization that allow the product to be customized to the homeowner’s personality and passions.

#3: Unmatched Image Performance

From color performance to black levels, in the right environment, projection dominates.Plus, you are not limited to a fixed aspect ratio of 16:9 high definition (which is a 1.781 aspect ratio). You can watch CinemaScope2.35:1 content without black bars using Runco’s CineWide® and CineGlide™ technology.

#4: 3D Done Right

The market excitement around 3D in the home is palpable and there is no better way to watch 3D than with projection. The big screen experience is more immersive and it enables Runco’s Constant Stereoscopic Video™ (CSV) with battery-free passive glasses for the best-in-class 3D performance.

#5: Energy Efficiency

Using power-consumption-per-square-inch calculations, projectors use a fraction of the energy of large flat panel displays. This is especially true of Runco’s InfiniLight™ lamplessLED illumination (available on the QuantumColor™ series and the 3Dimension™ D-73d).

Why doesn’t everyone have a theater?

First off, projection is seen as relatively complicated (as opposed to a buy-and-hang flat panel display, which is often a do-it-yourself project for the homeowner). This leads to people believing it to be wildly expensive, overly complex, or not even considering it as a possibility at all.

The second reason is people associate projectors with dark, cave-like rooms that can only be used for movie watching. Sometimes space, room size, or ceiling height limitations can make homeowners believe that projection will never work for them.

Once the homeowner considers projection, then the real work begins of making it work for their room.

Projection only works when the light on the screen is brighter than the brightness of the room. In other words, the “blackest” blacks of the scenes you show, will only be as dark as the screen before you turn on the projector and in many bright rooms that is simply not dark enough for acceptable viewing. Make no mistake, projection is not the best solution for every room.

Outsmarting the Sun

While the industry standards for theater brightness call for approximately 14 foot lamberts (fL) of luminance off the screen, the sun delivers a whopping 10,000 fL!

One of the ways to beat the sun and create incredible visual experiences in the home is with a flex-theater. When you can’t dedicate the space or the budget for a dedicated home theater, a flexible design that accommodates multiple uses of a single space can be a perfect compromise. A projection system combined with modular furniture and lighting control can transform a living room into a theater back into an entertainment space with a simple tap on a touchscreen.

To learn more about how to outsmart the sun with exceptional room designs, download the Runco's Guide to the Flex-Theater or review Runco's Guide to Projection Solutions.

Quick and Easy Updates with Runco RSS

Thursday, January 13, 2011

What is RSS?

RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' and allows you to view news, blog, video, podcast and other information feeds from multiple sources. By subscribing to a feed, you can customize what information you’d like direct access to.

Interested in receiving updates from Runco as soon as they are published, including product announcements, company news, events, and blog posts? We can deliver that information to you directly when you subscribe to the Runco RSS feeds.

RSS Makes Sharing Information Quick and Easy

RSS is one of easiest ways to share syndicated information online. It has become a popular method of sharing blog posts, online articles, news updates, press releases, and even syndicated videos and podcasts.

How do I subscribe to Runco's RSS feed?

www.Runco.com features two RSS feeds:

• News feed for the latest Runco news coverage
• Blog feed for updated Runco blog posts.

To subscribe to a Runco RSS feed:

1. Visit http://www.runco.com.
2. In the address bar at the top of your web browser, click on the orange RSS icon. A drop down menu should appear showing you two options:
   • Subscribe to 'News feed'
   • Subscribe to 'Blog feed'
3. Select the RSS feed you would like to follow.
4. On the next page, you will see a list of the latest posts from that feed, as well as a drop down menu at the top of the page asking you how you would like to subscribe to the feed.
   
   Options include:
• Live Bookmarks (This will save a version of the RSS feed to your web browser’s bookmarks)
• Microsoft Outlook (This will save each post from the RSS feed to a sub-folder within the "RSS Folder" in Microsoft Outlook)
• Google (This will save the RSS feed to your Google Feed Reader account)
• My Yahoo! (This will save the RSS feed to your My Yahoo! account)
5. This process can be used to subscribe to Runco's Twitter, Facebook and YouTube RSS feeds.
   Simply visit: http://www.twitter.com/RuncoLive, http://www.facebook.com/runcointernational, and http://www.youtube.com/runcointernational, then repeat steps 2-4 to subscribe to each feed.

Electronic House Features Runco Projectors in Top Cool Homes of 2010

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

From high-end desert haciendas to extreme sports fan media rooms, Electronic House highlighted the most extreme and luxurious home theaters and automation systems over the past 12 months. Among them were two viewing rooms featuring Runco projection systems:

Hockey-Themed Theater Serves Up Jumbo Fun

This stadium-style theater features a mini jumbotron, which was custom-designed to offer a classy and creative hiding spot for the Runco VideoXtreme™ VX-8d amidst flush-mounted, 32-inch displays.

Batcave Meets Home Theater

This viewing room contains a secret automated door leading to a CinemaScope theater, which features the Runco RS-900 with a CineWide 2.35:1 anamorphic lens.

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