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By Adrienne Maxwell and Geoffrey Morrison dome observatory
Do you need a projector to go with your outdoor screen? Check out our new guide to the best outdoor projector.
Forget about being cooped up in the living room for your next movie night. If you’re fortunate enough to have a backyard and pleasant weather, why not spread out on the lawn and enjoy an outdoor theater?
Although you could just project an image against a wall or garage door, a good projector screen helps to produce cleaner, brighter, more accurate video. We tested various outdoor screens to find our favorite rigid, inflatable, and DIY options.
This outdoor screen’s rigid frame, highly reflective screen, and adjustable height make it the best choice for creating a movie-like outdoor-theater experience. But it carries a high price.
If you don’t need an adjustable-height frame or an extra-large screen size, this rigid frame uses the same material as the pricier Yard Master Plus.
This screen inflates itself in seconds for easy setup and delivers solid picture quality. But you have to contend with drawbacks such as fan noise and a less taut screen surface.
With a high thread count, these white sheets offer solid picture quality for a low price. But you’ll need either a large, flat surface or a DIY frame.
You can project video on an outside wall or a garage door, but a good screen provides a smooth, color-neutral surface for better image quality.
We looked for freestanding outdoor screens that you can set up and take down as needed, including rigid, inflatable, and frameless models.
We measured how well each outdoor-screen material preserved image brightness to help get the most out of a projector.
These outdoor screens (and your projector) work well only at night. Even the brightest projection system can’t compete with the sun.
This outdoor screen’s rigid frame, highly reflective screen, and adjustable height make it the best choice for creating a movie-like outdoor-theater experience. But it carries a high price.
If you don’t need an adjustable-height frame or an extra-large screen size, this rigid frame uses the same material as the pricier Yard Master Plus.
If you want to get the best outdoor picture possible from your projector, we recommend the Elite Screens Yard Master Plus or Elite Screens Yard Master 2. With a rigid frame and a snap-in-place screen, these high-performance models look professional and serious, and the image quality is excellent.
The Yard Master Plus and Yard Master 2 use the same screen material and have the same basic frame design. The pricier Yard Master Plus lets you adjust the frame’s height and comes with a couple of extra support braces, and you can get it in larger 145- and 200-inch sizes. The more affordable Yard Master 2 has a fixed height (though you can buy height-extension legs separately) and maxes out at 135 inches.
The screen material’s smooth, highly reflective surface offers great brightness, while closely spaced button snaps ensure that the screen stays taut and mostly wrinkle-free. Unlike the inflatable and frameless screens we tested, the Yard Master screens can withstand a bit of wind, and their design allows for more ways to stabilize the base on any type of surface.
The setup process is straightforward and doesn’t require any tools, but it takes some serious elbow grease to stretch the screen material across the frame, which is essential to getting that smooth surface.
This screen inflates itself in seconds for easy setup and delivers solid picture quality. But you have to contend with drawbacks such as fan noise and a less taut screen surface.
If your top priority is a fast, easy setup, we like the Gemmy Airblown Inflatable Deluxe Movie Screen (model 39127-32). Just plug it in, and it inflates itself. It’s like a bouncy castle, but with a 144-inch-diagonal screen clipped across the front.
The screen material isn’t as reflective as that of the Yard Master Series (though it comes close enough), and getting it smooth and wrinkle-free is harder. But this model’s design is more stable than that of other inflatables we tested, and the use of two fans helps to inflate the base unit more evenly and effectively.
That said, you still must stake down this screen, as even the slightest amount of wind will send it rocking. Depending on your yard size and how close you’re sitting, the fan noise can be distracting, too.
The Gemmy screen doesn’t come in as many screen sizes as the Yard Master Series, but it does give you a larger screen for a lower price.
With a high thread count, these white sheets offer solid picture quality for a low price. But you’ll need either a large, flat surface or a DIY frame.
Using a bedsheet is one of the easiest movie-screen options, and Target’s Threshold 400 Thread Count Performance Sheets in white produce surprisingly good picture quality. They are impressively reflective and fairly neutral in color tone, but you must take the time to secure them and minimize the wrinkles.
Sheets are not as good as either of the actual outdoor screens we recommend, but for a lower price, they’re a great option for a DIY outdoor-theater buff.
Supervising editor Adrienne Maxwell, the current writer of this guide, has over a decade of experience reviewing TVs, projectors, and other video devices. She was formerly the video editor and primary TV tester for HomeTheaterReview. An ISF-certified calibrator, she has the full complement of objective testing gear to measure and evaluate the performance of projectors and screens.
Many portions of this guide were written by its previous author, Geoffrey Morrison, who has reviewed audio and video gear for 20 years at various magazines and websites, including Home Theater Magazine, CNET, and Sound and Vision. He is ISF- and NIST-trained and has used a projector as his main “TV” for over 15 years, so he is especially attuned to the particularities of projector and screen performance.
If you want the best and brightest picture quality possible for your outdoor home cinema, you should use an outdoor projector screen.
Yes, it’s easy—and free—to just shine a projector against a wall or garage door, but the problem with that approach is that you end up seeing the texture of whatever surface the projector shines against. Whether your wall is made of stucco or clapboards, that material becomes an added “feature” of your projected image. And that can be distracting.
A good outdoor projector screen has a particularly smooth surface, so you see only the movie image. It also offers a color-neutral surface that is likely to be much more reflective than a wall, so your image will look brighter and more accurate.
It’s important to note that these outdoor screens and any projector you choose will work well only at night. Even the brightest projector can’t compete with the sun. During the day, or even the early evening, a projector’s image is washed out at best and invisible at worst.
If you’re looking to gather all the gear you need for an outdoor theater, we also have setup tips and equipment recommendations, including projector and speaker options.
Skip the cinema this summer and enjoy a movie night in your backyard.
Our focus for this guide was on freestanding outdoor screens that you can set up and take down as needed, as opposed to higher-end, permanently installed screens for sheltered patios. We considered a variety of outdoor screen types, including rigid frames with snap-on screens, inflatable screens, and frameless screen materials.
Rigid screens include a frame and a screen material that usually attaches via snaps or hooks. This type of screen:
With inflatable screens, you typically lay out the base, inflate it with the supplied fan(s), and attach the screen material. This type of screen:
Frameless screens consist of only the screen material itself, sometimes with premade holes around the edges to allow for easy hanging. This type of screen:
Some outdoor projector screens come in both front- and rear-projection configurations. For this guide, we focused on front-projection materials. Some screens claim to be good for both setup types, but it’s generally best to choose one or the other; rear-projection material has to let more light pass through, which is not ideal for a front-projection setup.
Since freestanding outdoor screens are generally a limited-use item, we prioritized more-affordable options sold through mainstream retailers. Elite Screens is one of the few high-profile screen brands selling outdoor models at lower prices. Most other budget screens come from brands that live primarily on Amazon—you’ll find nearly or seemingly identical screens under multiple names. In those cases, we chose to test Amazon’s recommended or best-selling models.
We evaluated each screen based on both subjective and objective criteria. For our subjective evaluations, we considered the following:
Since two of the main reasons to use an actual screen are to preserve image brightness and have a color-neutral background, we also took objective measurements to evaluate each screen’s gain, or how well it reflected light back from a projector, and how close it was in color temperature to a reference screen material.
In each round of testing, we measured the screen material’s maximum luminance and color temperature using a light meter, a test-pattern generator, and Portrait Displays’s Calman video calibration software. We used the same projector, projecting the same image size in the same lighting conditions, and we compared the results with those of a reference screen.
This outdoor screen’s rigid frame, highly reflective screen, and adjustable height make it the best choice for creating a movie-like outdoor-theater experience. But it carries a high price.
If you don’t need an adjustable-height frame or an extra-large screen size, this rigid frame uses the same material as the pricier Yard Master Plus.
The Elite Screens Yard Master Plus and Elite Screens Yard Master 2, which use the same screen material, are each ideal for anyone who doesn’t want to sacrifice picture quality just because they’re sitting outside on their lawn. Also, one of these models is a particularly good choice if your yard isn’t well protected from sudden gusts of wind.
The Yard Master screen material delivered the best picture quality in our tests. This ISF-certified material did a great job of preserving image brightness and color accuracy, and it had a smooth surface with minimal wrinkles, thanks to the rigid frame. The black screen backing also ensures that light doesn’t pass through from behind.
Assembly is fairly straightforward and is similar for the two models. The hinged frame unfolds and locks into place without tools; the legs slide into the frame, and hand screws hold them in place.
You attach the screen via numerous button snaps. In our tests, initially the material had some wrinkles, but the tension on the screen mostly smoothed those out once we mounted it in place.
These screens come in a lot of size options. The Yard Master 2 comes in sizes from 58 to 135 inches diagonally (in a 16:9 shape), while the Yard Master Plus comes in sizes from 100 to 200 inches. We tested the 100-inch Yard Master 2 and the massive 200-inch Yard Master Plus in different backyard environments.
The Yard Master Plus’s adjustable-height design—a feature that isn’t available on the Yard Master 2, other budget rigid screens, and most inflatable screens—was especially helpful. The photo above shows the Yard Master Plus at its lowest setting, but you can mount it higher on its legs so that the people in the cheap seats can see over the heads of everyone down in front. (You can buy extension legs for the Yard Master 2, but they cost almost as much as the screen.)
The Yard Master withstands wind better than other screen types. No freestanding outdoor screen is perfectly stable, but the Yard Master's wide feet kept movement to a minimum regardless of the type of surface it stood on. These models also have an extra diagonal support beam on each leg to provide more stability—a feature that’s lacking on many cheap rigid screens.
A sudden gust of wind could still topple the screen if you do not secure it properly, but thankfully the package includes stakes to secure the base legs to softer ground, as well as ropes to tether the frame in place on a hard surface. You could also weigh down the legs using sandbags, 2-by-4s, or the like.
Disassembly is easier than an inflatable screen. While an inflatable screen may be faster to set up, we found the rigid screen easier to take down. Once you’re done with movie night, just snap off the screen, fold up the pieces, and pack them all in the supplied carrying bag. In contrast, inflatable screens collapse into a pile of mess you have to shift through, separate, and get the air out of.
Also, you don’t have to fully disassemble your Yard Master screen right away if you plan to use it regularly. You could pull the screen off the legs and slide it into a protected indoor slot in a garage or shed. The material can tolerate hand-washing with mild soap and water.
It takes arm strength to snap the screen in place. The biggest challenge in assembling a Yard Master screen—or any rigid outdoor screen—is attaching the material to the frame. The stretchy material is purposefully smaller than the frame, requiring you to pull it taut to snap it into place. Depending on your strength, this process can range from mildly challenging to seemingly impossible.
Yard Master screens have corner pull-loops to assist with this process. But if you know that you lack the requisite arm strength, you should get setup help or choose a different screen type.
This screen inflates itself in seconds for easy setup and delivers solid picture quality. But you have to contend with drawbacks such as fan noise and a less taut screen surface.
Gemmy’s Airblown Inflatable Deluxe Movie Screen is a good choice if you want a really big screen that you can set up quickly. But as with any inflatable screen, you must be willing to accept some performance and ergonomic compromises.
Setup is fast and easy. Wrangling your audience will take longer than setting up this Gemmy screen. The huge inflatable frame basically assembles itself in minutes. Other than plugging in the fans, powering the unit on, and staking down the frame, there’s not much else you need to do.
You attach the 144-inch flexible screen material to the frame with big plastic clips. By yourself, this task is a bit of a hassle but not impossible. With two people, it’s super easy.
The inflatable base sits low to the ground (as opposed to being up on two inflated legs) and is more filled-out than other inflatables we tested, which gives it solid stability. It also uses two built-in fans, whereas other models use one detached fan, a design that doesn’t fill the base as effectively.
The screen surface isn’t as smooth as what you’ll get from a rigid screen. In our tests, the Gemmy screen’s picture quality was good, but not as good as that of the Elite Screens Yard Master Series. For one, it’s difficult to get the Gemmy screen completely wrinkle-free, despite its adjustable straps, because you have nothing rigid to pull against—this is basically a balloon, and you’ll find no straight lines on a balloon. The wrinkles are less obvious in the dark, though.
This screen also didn’t preserve quite as much image brightness as the Yard Master screen, but the difference wasn’t massive.
You have to contend with fan noise. The fans that inflate the Gemmy screen must run constantly to keep it inflated. This creates a noise issue during your movie (the sound is akin to that of the inflatable decorations that invade suburban neighborhoods every October and December), as well as an electrical hazard. Confirm that whatever outlet you use is grounded and has a GFCI.
Ideally, you should position the screen far enough from a pool that, if it takes flight due to wind, it will pull its plug out before it lands in the water.
Inflatables are more susceptible to wind. You absolutely need to stake down this screen securely (ground stakes are supplied). This step is not optional. Because this inflatable is so big and so light, even a slight breeze sets it rocking. If your viewing area is all concrete, you may have no place to stake it down, so you’ll have to get creative.
Finally, unlike a rigid frame, which you can easily set aside when you aren’t using it, an inflatable deflates the moment you unplug the fans, leaving you with a pile of fabric and electronics that you should fold up and bring inside right away.
With a high thread count, these white sheets offer solid picture quality for a low price. But you’ll need either a large, flat surface or a DIY frame.
A white bedsheet is a simple, affordable choice if you have a large, flat surface to affix it to, or if you don’t mind assembling a DIY frame. We like Target’s Threshold 400 Thread Count Performance Sheet in white because it’s color-neutral, decently reflective, and quite inexpensive. Plus, it’s easy to pack up and store away in any closet when you aren’t using it.
This is a customizable option that you can incorporate into a variety of backyard setups. You can attach it to a wall or garage, hang it from a patio shelter, string it between posts, or build a frame.
The trick is making sure that the sheet doesn’t flap (or flaps minimally) in wind and remains pulled taut enough to minimize wrinkles. We recommend washing the sheet first to remove the major creases and then using an iron or steamer to tackle smaller wrinkles before hanging it.
The material performed surprisingly well in our tests. Although these Target sheets did not fare as well as the real rigid and inflatable outdoor screens did in our measurements, they worked far better than we expected. The color was solidly neutral, though a little warmer, or redder, than that of most of the traditional screens, and the material retained more image brightness than other frameless materials we measured, especially when we folded it in half to double up the fabric.
However, the sheet’s performance is much more dependent on how and where you mount it. A lot of light bleeds through a single layer of sheet material. If the sheet is just hanging in space with nothing behind it, the image will be far dimmer; you also shouldn’t have a light source behind it.
If you attach the sheet to a surface that’s reflective, you’ll get a brighter image. We recommend adding a backing such as PVC material or particleboard, doubling up the sheet by folding it in half, or adding a second sheet. You have lots of options to play with here.
Setup requires some thought and planning. It’s both a positive and a negative that a sheet offers so many ways to mount it as a screen. If you’re not sure whether you even own a screwdriver, this might not be the best outdoor-screen option for you. But if you’ve read this far and are already calculating the materials you’ll need to build a hinged frame out of scrap in your basement, this might be no problem at all.
One important thing to consider, regardless of how you’re planning to hang the sheet, is that in any sort of wind, the screen will flap—but the Target sheet is a bit thicker and sturdier than many of the frameless screen materials sold on Amazon.
If you don’t need a brand-name rigid screen: The Jwsit rigid projection screen, sold almost exclusively on Amazon, is quite similar to the Elite Screens Yard Master 2 in design and setup. We found it to be pretty well constructed, though you don’t get the extra diagonal support beams that come with the Yard Master 2, and a couple of the screen snaps didn’t line up quite right (which didn’t really affect the final result).
The screen material performed very well in our brightness test, but in color temperature it veered a little cooler, or bluer, than our picks, an effect that can make the image seem brighter.
The screen sizes range from 80 to 250 inches, and at the smaller sizes this model can be a little cheaper than the Yard Master 2. But the price jumps astronomically for models beyond 135 inches, so at that point you might want to stick with a known brand like Elite Screens (which offers a two-year warranty). We could not find warranty info for this model on Amazon.
If you want an ultra-affordable option to hang on a large, flat surface: We did not have high hopes for the $25 Mdbebbron frameless screen we bought on Amazon, but the results pleasantly surprised us. The material is light and stretchy, and the black border has numerous premade holes (wall adhesives and hooks are included), so you can easily pull the screen surface taut against a wall and get a smooth, wrinkle-free presentation—that is, as long as you have a big, flat surface to attach it to. The screen comes in only 120- and 150-inch sizes.
The drawback to the thin material is that it lets more light through than the Target sheet, so in our tests it didn’t preserve as much projector brightness. Ropes are included for you to tie the screen between poles or other framing materials, but the lightweight fabric would flap more noticeably in the wind in that setup, so we recommend that you stick with wall-mounting.
Most of the screens we considered come in multiple sizes. Though you might be tempted to get the biggest screen that fits in your yard, keep in mind that image brightness is directly proportional to image size—so your projector’s brightness capabilities will dictate screen size. A good home-theater projector should support larger sizes, as will our favorite outdoor projector.
But if you have a small, portable, battery-powered projector, the image will be impossible to see on, for example, a 200-inch screen.
Below is a table that shows the percentage of brightness retained on the different sizes of the Elite Screens Yard Master Plus. Just look at whatever the claimed lumen output is of your projector and then see how much dimmer the image would be as you go up in size. Unfortunately, this figure won’t be entirely accurate because projector lumen ratings are misleading at best and laughable at worst. But it will give you a general idea.
If your projector uses a lamp instead of an LED or laser light source, the age of the bulb is another big factor in determining how bright your projector actually is—even a few hundred hours of bulb usage could make your projector significantly dimmer than its rated specs.
As you can see by the numbers, even a bright home theater projector (rated at over 2,000 lumens) would be fairly dim on a 200-inch screen. A low-brightness, 500-lumen projector would be nearly unwatchable at that screen size.
Subjectively, we found that a projector with a measured brightness of 1,500 lumens (2,500 claimed) created a watchable image on all the screens we tested, even outside on a fairly bright night. If your area is darker, you could get away with a bit less.
Elite Screens Pop-up Cinema Series: We wanted to love this affordable pop-up screen, but sadly it’s a great idea poorly executed. The flexible screen and base unfold and pop into shape immediately, like larger versions of a fold-out car sunshade—you can set up the 84- or 92-inch screen in less than five minutes. But we found the build quality to be surprisingly poor: The Velcro tabs that connected the base and screen failed to line up, the screen material was extremely wrinkled and performed the worst in our brightness test, and folding the pieces back up to put them in the supplied bag was much harder than Elite Screens’s video makes it look.
Vivohome Inflatable Movie Screen: Available in sizes of 14 to 24 feet, this inflatable screen (and, presumably, the many copycats on Amazon) was less stable than our inflatable pick from Gemmy. Setting up the screen itself is fast and easy, but the design of the base and its use of a single fan, which doesn’t distribute air as evenly as dual fans, caused the front of the screen to fall forward a lot in our tests.
Once we got everything secured, it performed pretty well. But we spent so much time experimenting with the screen and rope placement to keep the screen upright that setting up a rigid screen would’ve been faster. Plus, the black base material could bleed onto the white screen material very easily if it got even a little wet.
If you plan to buy a different inflatable screen than our recommendation, look for one that has a fuller, more triangular base with back supports to keep the screen upright—as opposed to the two-feet design of this model.
Tripod “slide show” screens: We did not test any screens with a tripod-style base. Many of these screens have a 4:3 shape, not the wider, 16:9 format used for HDTV and many movies. That by itself isn’t a huge issue, but the small footprint of the tripod on such screens makes them far more wobbly than the wide-stance rigid screens we reviewed. Indoors, wobbliness isn’t a problem, but outside on soft, uneven ground, where you often have wind, your screen could take a nosedive halfway through Mamma Mia.
DIY construction materials: You can find plenty of materials that make a great DIY screen if you’re ambitious enough to tackle the project.
Some readers of our article about setting up a DIY outdoor theater commented on using more industrial materials—specifically, white PVC roofing material or clear plastic wrap. The PVC material should reflect light just as well as, if not better than, the Target sheets we tested, and it is smooth. It also offers the bonus of being weatherproof. The cost should be similar, unless you know some roofers who can give you scraps for free.
Be wary of any materials that are too glossy or mirrorlike, since such a surface can create a noticeable and image-ruining hotspot in the center of the screen. If that’s what you have on hand, however, you could always secure a white sheet to it and enjoy a rigid, highly reflective, and—if you do it right—wrinkle-free screen.
The clear plastic wrap, essentially a jumbo version of what you might use in your kitchen to wrap food, could work as a rear-projection screen. However, we imagine that such a screen would be a significant hassle to construct without any wrinkles. Since our goal with this guide is to find approaches that improve the picture quality, one of the other options listed here is likely to be better.
A 4-by-8 sheet of oriented strand board, painted white, would provide a strong and reflective backing for the Target sheets. It wouldn’t work well on its own, even painted, since you’d likely see the texture of the board. Particleboard with a melamine surface wouldn’t require painting, though you would have to take care to avoid bumping the edges during storage between movie nights.
This article was edited by Grant Clauser.
Adrienne Maxwell is the supervising editor of Wirecutter's audio/video team, covering everything from headphones to TVs. She has been a writer, editor, and reviewer in the consumer electronics industry for 20 years, and previously served as the executive editor of Home Theater Magazine and the managing editor of HomeTheaterReview.com.
Geoffrey Morrison is Wirecutter’s former AV editor, current editor-at-large, and a travel writer and photographer. He covers action cameras, gimbals, travel backpacks, and other gear. He has been to all 50 states and 60 countries, and he is the author of Budget Travel for Dummies and the sci-fi novel Undersea.
by Geoffrey Morrison and Adrienne Maxwell
Skip the cinema this summer and enjoy a movie night in your backyard.
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by Adrienne Maxwell and Chris Heinonen
A good projector screen is an essential complement to a home projector. We have recommendations for value-oriented fixed-frame, pull-down, and DIY screens.
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dome theater Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).