If you’re like I was, finishing out the game room can really stretch your wallet thin. One of the places I originally skimped on was my home theater screen. Instead of buying a screen, I made a painted wall.
Painted Wall Screen
Originally when I finished my theater, I painted the front wall with ultra white from Home Depot. In order to make a border around the screen, I bought 1 x 4’s from Home Depot and wrapped them in black velvet to make a border that absorbed all extra light. It worked really well for quite a while, but I was never quite satisfied with the picture. Eventually, I moved onto a new option…
Fabric Theater Screen
After the painted wall, I upgraded to a fabric screen. When I was first looking at fabric screens, they were all between $500 and $1000 for a 120″ screen. To me, that was too much when a painted wall was like $50 and offered 90% of performance. That changed 
though a couple years ago when I found this from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CYLOTPK/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1
$249 for a 120″ screen was a big savings over what I was looking at before. How could I lose? So I went ahead and ordered one.
Putting it together was fairly straightforward, but getting the canvas all stretched out required a bit of effort. 2 years later it still looks great,
maybe the only slight issue is that there might be a slight bow in the middle (but you’d never notice until you really really looked hard for it).
I’ve tried to take some pictures of the screen. The one on top is one with my side lights on, the one on the bottom is one with the side lights off. Projector is a Viewsonic Pro8100 that I’ve owned for quite a while, so with a better projector it could look even better. The source material is also not high def, fyi.
Hope this helps for those looking for an affordable projector screen. The painted wall definitely works as a temporary solution, but the screen is definitely a better long term solution.
