Xavier College has over 140 years’ experience in educating boys from Prep to year 12, and more recently girls from kindergarten to year 4. They are a Jesuit Catholic school with a spiritual tradition of St Ignatius Loyola. They’re also part of a larger network of Jesuit schools across the world that were formed in keeping with his vision. Their aim is to develop well rounded Christian pupils with competence, compassion and conscience.
On their Kostka Hall Campus, Xavier College found themselves in a bit of a predicament. They have a Hall that is used for assemblies, physical education, sport, music and various other school functions. The room is quite airy with plenty of skylights in the ceiling. At one end of the hall they have a stage and they wanted to use this for projection. Unfortunately because the hall is so light the screen was looking a little pale. They also found that they needed to remove all the projection gear every time they wanted to use the rest of the court or stage and this was time consuming and uncomfortable for those who had to do the heavy lifting.
The school needed a system which worked better, could be activated and dropped into place and that met an exacting budgetary requirement. The biggest challenge for this was the amount of ambient light in the court. The other real challenge was that the stage area was fairly small and it made trying to fit a decent screen onto it awkward. It was also important that the final setup made use of their existing sound system. Our consultant met with them and recommended a solution that would suit their needs.
To overcome the brightness we designed a rear projection solution using the Epson EBZ-Z8350W which is an 8500 ANSI WXGA projector. A rear projection solution – essentially is placed behind the screen rather than in front of it, this offers a considerable boost in brightness to overcome the ambient light issue. We also made certain that we selected a black projector in a black cage so as to make it vanish into the back wall so it wasn’t distracting when not in use.
A large 150” Screen Technics display screen was used to offer an image large enough to be viewed from anywhere in the court. With a little work it was also easy enough to relocate the audio and speaker controls to a single simplified control that allowed for button push access to the whole system (including the projector).
The school were very pleased with the quality of solution and were also happy that DIB has access to the lowest and latest pricing that respected their project budget.
Epson EBZ-Z8350W in black cage