AV News Magazine

AV News 196 - May 2014 The IAC Peter Coles International AV Competition 2014 Place Gold Medal Sequence AZ Silver & First People Of The Forest Time Entrant Author Robert Albright Cntry UK Jacek Zaim & Urszula Gronowska Pol Bronze One Stroke at a Time Colin Balls UK PAGB Ribbons Return Jacek Zaim & Urszula Gronowska Pol A Compassionate Man Len Deeely UK Judges Special Mention The Man Who Saw The Future Richard Brown UK The Power of Memories Richard Brown UK This Special Place Martin Fry UK Cambridge Remembered Malcolm & Jenny Gee UK Codex Pacificus René -Augustin Bougourd Fra Chihuly Ian Bateman UK Heroes Martin James UK Endinako Johan Nieman SA The Match Alastair Taylor UK Domus David & Barbara Pickford UK Frank Edwin Bailey Ire M u s in g s o n S c re e n s Maurice Dybeck ARPS Do we appreciate how lucky we are these days when projectors have such powerful outputs? Remember when, with the old slide projectors, even the good ones, you had to make sure you had a good blackout before the picture could be seen and appreciated. To help us, we had those beaded reflective screens which gave a good picture, as long as you were sitting in the middle. And as for screen size, few of us would venture to show on a screen bigger than four feet, in old currency. And of course that probably meant small audiences for most presentations. But have you noticed how, even today, many audiences are reluctant to occupy the near seats? Is this modesty? Or what might be called the 'church pew' effect? I suppose the idea of being content with a small screen goes back to the early days of television when viewing was rather like studying half a postcard at arm's length. (Try it.) Come to think of it those family snaps which you got back from Boots were pretty tiny things to look at. Just dig out your parents' albums and see what we put up with. And if you went to the pictures maybe you were quite content to occupy the back row, or was that for other reasons? Cinema was of course the place where we could first enjoy a big screen. Was it Tod AO that came first? And then we had Cinerama and those wider screens. In their wake, and in our field, along came the Widescreen Centre in London, which offered all shapes and sizes to the domestic market. Page 32

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