Last Thursday, I found myself among a group of journalists invited to tour the inner workings of Stewart Filmscreens, a 62-year-old company located in Torrance, California.

The Stewart name, although it may not be familiar to you, is well known in Hollywood. Stewart has manufactured projection screens for major studios, post-production houses, and even residences of prominent directors, producers, and actors.

Stewart is also a major player in home theater and the CEDIA channel with their StudioTek, GrayHawk, and FireHawk line of front screens. And the pro AV channel also sees a lot of Stewart product, ranging from enormous seamless front and rear screens for seamless edge blending to glass-surface screens with custom coatings for high-end architectural applications.

Don Stewart, one of many family members that continue to run the company and its four worldwide locations (with additional plants in Ohio, Singapore, and Denmark), was our tour guide as we started from a pallet of sacks of PVC powder and observed every step from molding, curing, cutting, trimming, and quality control to tensioning, framing, and shipping.

Stewart is capable of manufacturing the largest seamless screens in the world, up to 40 feet in height and 90 feet in length. And they’ve developed numerous screen surfaces to handle high and low ambient light environments. Most of these developments have come through trial and error over the past six decades, as has a great deal of the manufacturing equipment used at the company’s facility, right off the 110 freeway.

During our tour, we watched as skilled craftsmen and women expertly trimmed and finished screens, turned large aluminum rollers and welded large truss frames, and went over every square inch of raw screen material with front and backlights and magnifying glasses and loupes.

Stewart told us his company is a leader in "green" manufacturing in California, minimizing hazardous substance exposure and safely handling the byproducts of the PVC mixing process. An example: Excess heat from the molding process is ingeniously piped upstairs to a "curing" room, where enormous sheets of raw screen material harden while lying on the floor.

In addition to conventional framed and truss screens, Stewart also manufactures curved screens (CineCurve), hemispheric projection surfaces, and high-end Director’s Choice screens in unusual sizes. (Our tour took us past a 13×23 DC order that was being built for a media room!) Don Stewart also explained how the company overcame the problems with using non-tempered glass to develop their StarGlas screen product and still have it qualify as safety glass, allowing floor-to-ceiling installations.

Our tour concluded with a look at some new Stewart designs, including a 1.0 (unity) gain screen. Don Stewart characterized it as a "perfect Lambertian emitter," and it’s intended to be used in a nearly dark room. I hope to have a sample of this screen soon for testing. Also on display were examples of the popular GrayHawk and FireHawk screens that are well suited to microdisplay front projectors using 3LCD, DLP, and LCoS technologies.

I have to admit, I learned considerably more about the projection screen manufacturing process than I expected when the tour started. Stewart’s R&D commitment is impressive, as is the tenure of many of its employees (the trimmers I spoke to had been there between 15 and 20 years).

As a custom manufacturer, the "let’s throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" mentality continues to serve the company well, not to mention the homegrown expertise they’ve accumulated over the years. The next time you sit in a movie theater or enjoy a Blu-ray disc in your own theater, just remember — there’s way more than meets the eye when it comes to screens.

A more detailed discussion and photos of the tour will appear in the September issue of Large Display Report.