Any regrets going to projector/curved screen?

Just curious if anyone has ever made the switch to a 2/3 projector, curved screen setup and then regretted it. The top complaint I’ve always heard has been resolution, or that they didn’t realize they’d have to keep the room fairly dark to obtain a decent image. But other than those two thing that could be easily remedied (high quality projectors, darken the room), has anyone just flat out said “you know, TVs/monitors were just better and this wasn’t worth the time/cost/hassle.”

Currently exploring my options, but just wanted to get some input from those who may have some experience in this. Thanks!

I am hoping Asobo will support this natively on FS. For real immersion, in a home cockpit, projectors are a must.

Yeah, I agree, and given that I only fly on MSFS it’s giving me pause to consider a curved screen seeing some others having a few issues with it, namely in a dual home cockpit setup both viewpoints of the pilot/co-pilot cause the feeling that the aircraft is crabbing. I’ve heard you can simply slide the camera view further left (for main pilot) and that solves it, but then it is 10 times worse from the right (co-pilot) view. I see this a bit on my 49" curved monitor already. I’ve been considering just doing a three 65" TV setup instead, but not sure.

Hi,

I tried a short throw Optima projector before I purchased three and found I didn’t like the washed out look compared to a 4K monitor with back lighting.

I hope one day we get networking capability, my setup is maxed out running seven monitors on one computer! Three 75" for my visuals @ 4K and four additional monitors running my pmdg glass displays.

I had my optima short throw beamer setup with own made curved screen which i liked very much
Used it for 2004 sim century of flight and started to use for msfs. But this was hd quality, than i bought a 4k beamer but unfortunatly my screen was to big (2.2m diameter) for the beamer was not a short throw beamer and my attic was to small to make the distance larger from the screen.
The image quality was good and sharp tho.
Now atm i fly with nine monitor screen setup and i like very much but i do want to go back to beamer setup
Combined with this nine monitor screens setup but this means i have to rebuild my 2.2 diameter beamerscreen which is not a problem
The plan is to fit the beamer screen between and behind the monitorsscreens and project the outside world in 4k tho i will setup in windowed screen and no plane
For on the nine monitors i will fit the cockpit and merge them together with your controls
The other option i have is resseling my two beamers if it wont suffice and buy a laser beamer which is ultra short throw.
Im pretty confidend if all of this works out for the bending of the beamerscreen and fiddle of camera cfg will get it on screen the way i like.
So to stay on topic i would say no regrets whatsoever, but i rather bend the screen my self than buy one of those very expensive curved ones that last me for maybe 3 years and burn the word windows
to some pixels.

Beamer layout as is in blender


Fs2004 century of flight the past

Then there is the atm setup

1 Like

I have a curve 34 wide , and it works great, the only problem I have is in the cockpit when I look outside, the view and runway look so closely, other than that , men I have a beautiful look and I did gain some frames, especially in new York, I’m getting 45 fps with a Asus strix z590 , 32 ram GTX 1070ti, and I’m happy with it, imagine having a rtx, wow

I just made the move from xbox series x to pc, and got a 34" Dell curved gaming monitor, and it’s really good, highly recommended

Are you SwannSim from YouTube? (the profile pic gives it away haha) If so, I’ve chatted with you a bit during some of Pat738’s streams! I’m the guy with the Longitude cockpit. I’m glad to know another guy running a pit in MSFS!

Yeah, that’s one of my concerns with the projector setup. I know the curved screen with the projectors giving a 180 or even 220 degree wrap around view would be insane, but I also worry I’d do it and the image quality would be “meh.” I currently run a 49" curved ultra wide as my main front/windshield view, and then two 34" ultra wide’s as my side windows, using the render/multi-monitor function in MSFS to populate those two side views. Of course once I do that with the render windows it tanks the FPS quite a bit, and then yeah I pop out an additional 4 instrument panel pop outs onto 4 other monitors, so like you my system is SPENT. Couple that with streaming from that same PC, it really takes a toll.

I don’t hate my current 3 monitor view setup, but I’m toying with either trying a projector set up, or maybe three 65" TVs. You say you’re running three 75" at 4K and you’re doing ok? Do you use the render/multi monitor setting in MSFS, or are you just stretching the one window across all 3?

1 Like

Warning: long post ahead!

I used to have a 180-degree curved screen setup. It was just small enough to allow me to get away with 2 projectors. This was with P3D as the main sim, and one PC used as an image generator with another as the host sim system.

I didn’t regret my choice, but there were drawbacks. First, it was expensive. The screen and projector gantry were self-made, and not hugely expensive to make, but then I needed two short-throw projectors and when one developed an irreparable fault several years later, I had to buy two replacements because that model was no longer made and you absolutely need matched pairs of projectors. That hurt, let me tell you! Then the extra software I needed was very expensive because it’s so specialist. It’s cheaper than it used to be but you’re still going to be spending thousands.

There are other practical problems. Getting the image corrected for the shape of the screen is painful. You can’t really eyeball it satisfactorily, you need tools to help you. Believe me, I tried, but with a screen that large that wraps around you, any imperfection / deviation will drive you mad. I also had some issues with focus at the extremes of the screen; projectors are made to focus at a flat plane, and depending on the radius of your screen, you might find you have to compromise on some softness of focus in some areas of the image.

There’s also the issue of squashing / expanding the image, which is done by the warping software. After warping, the pixels in the warped image no longer correspond 1:1 to pixels on the projector image, so you get areas where effectively a single image pixel is represented by less than a single ‘real’ pixel, and vice versa. This gives some area of the image less sharpness, and can manifest in some odd artifacts that you can’t stop noticing once you see them. It’s less of an issue with a 3 projector system than a 2.

My projectors would drift out of precise alignment over time. A simple matter of the mounts not being 100% rigid, me having a train line not far from my house causing vibrations, and heating/cooling cycles in the projectors causing the lens assembly to shift minutely. So every few weeks I’d have to do a re-alignment exercise, or else the part of the image when the two projectors overlap would become blurred. Speaking of which, you’ll get a bright grey stripe where the projectors overlap when the screen should be black. This is the ‘black offset’ problem and while there are ways to solve it, none are perfect and doing it ‘properly’ is… you guessed it! Expensive. I did come up with a DIY solution which sort-of worked, but never perfectly.

The projectors kick out a major amount of heat. Add the multiple PCs to that, and my room could easily get up past 40C after a couple of hours. In summertime that could be enough to overheat the PCs, so I had to buy aircon for cooling and still the sim room would become a sauna. There are ways to tackle this but they were beyond my engineering skills.

Finally, the other big issue is perspective correction. You can map your display to the curve of the screen, that’s fine, but then a straight line (like a runway) seen perpendicular ahead of you will appear curved around the screen. So you need to correct this. In P3D this would be done by creating a ViewGroup with individual view frustums for each view (2 or 3, one per projector) calculated so that after the image is warped the views align in precisely the right way to cancel out the curve and make straight lines appear straight. It’s magical when you see it the first time, but it’s just maths. However, the software to make the maths go is complex and - again - expensive.

With MSFS, you don’t have the ability to define view frustums or move the origin, which makes the above much closer to impossible. Fly-Elise NG (who make the warping software I used to use) does now have an experimental system that can sort-of do it using the experimental MSFS multi-view capability (or a multi-channel system) but my understanding is that your setup has to fit very specific requirements for this to even work. Until and unless MSFS gets individually-definable view frustums and cameras per-view, doing what you can do in P3D and X-Plane will remain impossible. TBH I don’t think we’ll ever get it, I don’t think it’ll ever be high enough up the list for Asobo to spend time on it.

So, given all the above, why didn’t I regret my decision? Well, you have to see and sit inside a wraparound screen running a sim with full perspective correction to believe it. It’s just amazing. LCD screens have a better image, but they are flat - which introduces distortion - and have poor viewing angles, and bezels.

Ultimately, though, I decided to demolish mine and build something new. Originally intended to be a better projector system, but I’ve more or less decided to go with big TVs, which will work better with MSFS. But life got in the way and I haven’t even started it yet, so my current setup has only a single large TV for a display, and you have no idea how much I miss the situational awareness of being able to look left or right and just see straight out the window without any TrackIR nonsense.

If you have deep pockets and don’t tend to regret spending big chunks of cash for the sake of experience, I’d say go for it. You’ll definitely have fun :slight_smile:

At the risk of a tiny bit of self-promotion, there are some videos shot in my old cockpit, and a bunch of video on the display tech and its setup, on my YouTube channel.

2 Likes

Hi Skytation,

Yep, that’s me from youtube. I have my three monitors setup via MS2020 experimental sub section, not sure if this is what you mean by render/multi. I also have all the glass screens popped out. Everything performs great. All of this is running on one 7950X3D computer with a 4090, DDR5 ram and a 990 pro nvme.

Yep, the experimental tab is what I meant. Nice, yeah mine is running on 13700KF with a 4070 Ti. I’m fine with the sim performance (for the most part) I think I just bog it down by trying to stream from the PC as well. I’m also just a bit worried about moving to three 65" TVs and how that may be more strain than the 3 monitors I have already. Guess we’ll see.

This is great info, thank you! I’ll def check out your channel for more!