Da-Lite Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol Projection Screen Review

Tension Cosmopolitan Build Quality and Setup

When building a dedicated home theater, it easy to get excited about the speakers, the display, and even the furniture. One of the least sexy parts is the screen. Screens just seem so… pedestrian. But the fact is that a screen can make a huge difference in the quality of the picture you experience from your front (or rear) projection system. Sure you can project on a white wall, but don't complain when you can't quite get the colors right or when the contrast of your image isn't as great as it could be.

Da-Lite has been in the screen business for a very long time. They mostly focus on high end and large venue projects. What this means is that they may not be the cheapest kid on the block, but they are one of the best. When we went looking for a screen for our Reference System 3 upgrade, we looked at just about everything on the market. One of the first things that drew our attention to Da-Lite was their Tensioned Dual Masking Electrol screen. This is a drop screen that masks from the top and the sides so that you have black edges for (nearly) every video format. This will help clean up all those edges and increase perceived contrast. Unfortunately, it was only available as an in-ceiling installation product. While we considered framing it in with an aftermarket box, we ultimately decided against it. It wasn't the way the screen was meant to be installed and just didn't seem fair for the company. Instead, we went with the next best thing - the Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol.

There are a few things to consider when choosing a screen. Wall mount or ceiling, fixed or retractable, tensioned or no, masking or no. That last one is probably out of most people's budgets. Masking systems reformat the screen with black borders for different aspect ratios. They are relatively new to the home market and tend to be very expensive. If you are shooting on a wall, a fixed screen is the cheapest option out there. No moving parts means you can get into them for just a few hundred dollars. But if you're looking for more flexibility, you'll want to consider a drop screen. Manual is by far cheaper than electric but electric has the coolness factor of dropping on its own. Lastly, with a tensioned screen, you don't have to worry about warps and movement as much. Of course, this exponentially adds to the price.

One of the things you have to consider is screen material. If you are looking for a rear projection setup or are placing your speakers behind your screen, your options will be more limited. But if you are like the majority of consumers, you are looking for a front projection screen that will work when the speakers are either under it or to the sides. While the uninitiated may want to go for the highest contrast screens, thinking the biggest numbers are the best, the fact is that it is really dependent on your room. The more light control you have, the less you have to worry about having a high gain screen. We here at Audioholics suggest something between a 1.2 and 1.4 gain in a room that can be light controlled. In more ambient environments you'll want something more like 1.5-2.0. Just don't expect your blacks to be very black.

Build Quality

The Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol arrived as you might expect, in a long, thin box. The screen housing was mounted to a large piece of MDF and surrounded at the ends with foam endcaps and along the length by foam ribs. Provided that your delivery driver isn't completely incompetent, the screen should arrive with no damage.

The screen is housed in a larger black aluminum case (though white and custom finishes are available). The screen is heavy, but not overly so. The case is sturdy and well made. There is an identification placard on the right with removable endcaps. On the left endcap there is a removable place that covers the connection points for the IR receiver, wall control plate, and power connection. You'll need to provide your own power cord (we just got a standard three-prong 12-gauge extension cord from our local home improvement store and stripped one end).

There are a few different mounting options with the Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol. The endcaps have holes for hanging from the ceiling using hooks and/or chain. You can use the same holes for wall mounting to a #6 bracket. The same endcap has holes flush to the back wall for wall mounting either in the room or recessed in the ceiling. We opted for the optional floating ceiling mount. What this does is add a rail to the back of the unit from the edges to about a third of the way in. You can then add to "L" shaped brackets that connect to the ceiling and the rail. This gives you a lot more flexibility in placement plus the ability to move the screen from side to side at a later time without having to reinstall it. Think that isn't important? Wait until you upgrade your projector and find out the new one has the lens on the opposite side as your old one. For an $84 upgrade, this is well worth it in our opinion.

The "tensioned" part of the Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol are the cables that run up the sides of the screen. This limits the side to side movement and flexing of the screen due to air turbulence. For the uninitiated, they tend to think that this will make the screen as tight as a drum. That's not the case. The string pulls gently on the screen to keep it in place but not so tight that it will stretch or warp it. There are adjustment screws at the bottom of the screen on each side for tightening at a later time.

You have two options for remote control of the Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol screen - IR or 12 volt. Because of the challenges with integration, you can have one but not the other. In our case we went with IR as not every projector has a 12 volt trigger. All of the screens come with a standard wall control. This is a pretty easy installation as it is a phone-type jack with a good bit of cable for in-wall/in-ceiling installation. We ended up just buying double-gang 1/2 Decora-style, 1/2 light switch cover and added the wall control to an existing light switch in the room. The remote is of the throw-away variety - utilitarian at best. Black, non-backlit, and frankly fugly, it is meant to be used to program into a universal remote system and then placed in a drawer to be forgotten.

Setup

The floating bracket really made setting up the Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol screen a lot easier than it could have been. If we had been using the endcaps, we'd have to find at least one joist and hope to find another on the other side. With the floating mount, we just found two that we knew would hit near the middle of the mounting rails and installed them. Once we got the screen on, we were able to move it from left to right to help center it as needed. This will also be useful later as we get new projectors in for review. A projector without horizontal lens shift can be aligned to the screen by loosening the two screws on the floating mount and sliding the screen over a bit. A simple solution to an annoying problem. For normal consumers, the $84 for the floating mount is insurance for future projector purchases and makes for a really, REALLY easy install.

The next step is to connect all the wires. The power is as simple as stripping the end off an extension cord and connecting it to the supplied wires. The IR and wall control both connect via phone cord-ish (RJ11) connectors so that is really easy. Da-Lite gives you plenty of cable for all but the longest runs. We ran the wall control cable from one side of the screen to the other, up into the ceiling, and then back down the wall near the back of the room. We ended up having just enough.

One thing you want to be sure of when you install the wall control is that you've set the level of the screen before finishing the installation. On the back of the wall controls there are adjustments so that you can set the drop and the rise of the screen. This is imperative for some installations. While it is not a big deal to remove the plate and make those adjustments later, better to get it out of the way up front.

We mounted the IR sensor to the ceiling right above the screen case. While it doesn't really blend, it isn't too bad. We'd like to see an option to include the sensor in the enclosure in future Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol offerings. The cable provided was also very long (like the wall control) though we were able to fit it all inside the endcap (with a little assertiveness).

Da-lite Use and Conclusion

There really isn't much to say about the use of a screen. It either works or it doesn’t. We have complete light control of Reference System 3 so we went with the Cinema Vision screen material which has a 1.3 gain and a 45 degree viewing angle. This gives us plenty of options for no, low, and high light situations. We needed a drop screen because the room is set up so that the seating faces a window. With the screen up, we can open the drapes and enjoy (for the first time since we set up home theater equipment in this room) the outside. With the curtains closed and the screen down, we can have complete blackness even in the harsh sun of Florida summers.

The screen viewing angle is rated at 45 degrees but we found that we could enjoy the picture much wider than that. We've had 71" rear projection displays in this same room and have experienced the dimming effect that such units usually create. With a front projector, you get none of that. The tension on the screen meant we didn't need to worry about where the AC blew (as it is normally set to blow toward the front of the room). Even when we were adjusting gear during use (like moving speakers), we found that before we could return to our seats the screen would stop moving.

The only real downside of the Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol we found was that the black masking areas were not as absorptive as they could have been. With fixed screens, they use black velvet which is very non-reflective. The black borders of the Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol were reflective enough that we could see the "true" edges of the picture in low light. At close range you could also see indentations on the edges from where the tabs for the tensioning system overlapped when the screen was retracted.

One thing we didn't quite understand was why the screen edge had to stick out of the casing when fully retracted. We thought of manually setting the retraction point for inside the case but all the pictures on the Da-Lite material showed it hanging out a little bit. This made for a less than clean look and we would have preferred to have it flush with the bottom of the case.

One of the features we opted for was the Silent Motor. The Silent Motor, while not actually silent, is very quiet. For most home theater installations, we're not sure this would be necessary but for the cost of 10% of the screen (or much less depending on your size and options), it is a nice option to have. It definitely provides very quiet operation of the unit.

Really, though, the proof is in the pictures. We were able to get very good performance out of the Da-Lite Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol in all lighting situations. We were very impressed with its performance, even with lights on in the room. We were expecting to have to keep the room locked down, but with daylight coming in from the sides of the room or from the kitchen, we were able to experience very good picture quality. The only time we really noticed significant degradation of the picture was during very dark scenes with a light on in the room right next to the projector. No amount of screen gain is really going to be able to do much with that.

The screen material never showed any wrinkling or marks even after several weeks of continuous use (by continuous we mean there are kids in the house that can reach the screen wall controls and probably play with it every time the parents are out of the room). This is one of the top considerations with retractable screens - will the rolling mechanism dimple or wrinkle the screen material. So far we've experienced none of that.

Price

When value shopping, it's easy to look at the price tag and think, "Well, they're all about the same, right?" While we haven't tested every screen on the market, you can do a quick search and find that Da-Lite is not the most (or the least) expensive game in town. They trend toward the median in our experience. The things that really impressed us with this screen is that, for the price, the Floating Bracket is a stroke of genius. We were also impressed with their ability to get custom orders in very short time which, in our opinion, makes them invaluable to dealers and custom installers. We've heard from other manufacturers that will quote custom order wait times in months, not days. For an enthusiast, and certainly an installer, such wait times simply aren't bearable.

We're sure some of our more astute readers will notice that the base price and the "as tested" price are significantly different for this model. There are some very good reasons for this. To start with, we asked for a non-standard screen size. This meant a custom cut. Even with that, the time we asked to the time we received the screen was about 1.5 weeks. Yes, weeks. Da-Lite is obviously used to filling custom orders quickly. The floating bracket, IR control, and 'silent' motor all added to the cost. For a full breakdown, we have:

• Tensioned Cosmopolitan with Cinema Vision screen and 92' HDTV size - $2,375

• Silent Motor - $167

• Built-in Low Voltage Control - $250

• Custom Size - $60

• Floating Mounting Brackets - $84

• IR Remote and Receiver - $95

Conclusion

While it may be hard for some enthusiasts to get excited about a projection screen, the fact is that they can play a huge part in making (or breaking) your viewing experience. The Da-Lite Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol screen was quiet, wrinkle and blemish free, and frankly a breeze to set up. With the number of options at your fingers and Da-Lite's ability to provide custom screens in short order, they are a company that we have no problems recommending.

Tensioned Cosmopolitan Electrol

$1649.95 ($3,031 as tested)

Da-Lite Screen Company, Inc.
3100 North Detroit Street
Post Office Box 137
Warsaw, IN 46581-0137

(574) 267-8101
(800) 622-3737

Da-Lite Screen Company, Inc.
Da-Lite Screen Company, Inc. is one of the world`s leading manufacturers and distributors of projection screens. Da-Lite`s projection screens, which are focused on the premium end of the large screen market, are used in a wide range of settings including conference rooms, educational institutions, live entertainment venues, meeting rooms, training facilities, houses of worship and private homes. Da-Lite`s products provide the viewer with an enhanced visual experience in settings where a large screen adds to the communication of information or entertainment. The Company`s products are versatile and can be customized to fit the needs of unique viewing venues.

The Score Card

The scoring below is based on each piece of equipment doing the duty it is designed for. The numbers are weighed heavily with respect to the individual cost of each unit, thus giving a rating roughly equal to:

Performance × Price Factor/Value = Rating

Audioholics.com note: The ratings indicated below are based on subjective listening and objective testing of the product in question. The rating scale is based on performance/value ratio. If you notice better performing products in future reviews that have lower numbers in certain areas, be aware that the value factor is most likely the culprit. Other Audioholics reviewers may rate products solely based on performance, and each reviewer has his/her own system for ratings.

Audioholics Rating Scale

• — Excellent
• — Very Good
• — Good
• — Fair
• — Poor

Metric	Rating
Build Quality
Ergonomics & Usability
Ease of Setup/Programming/Integration
Features
Remote Control
Performance
Value