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Availability is an issue right now for outdoor movie screens, and we've noticed that prices are fluctuating wildly. Our team will check regularly to find the best places to buy.
Forget about being cooped up in the living room for your next movie night. If you’re fortunate enough to have a backyard, 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 screen helps to produce cleaner, brighter, more accurate video. We tested two popular outdoor screens and one DIY screen option to learn what you can expect from each.
The rigid frame and highly reflective screen deliver the most movie-like outdoor theater experience.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $271.
If you want to get the best outdoor picture possible from your projector, the Elite Screens Yard Master Plus is the way to go. With a rigid frame and a snap-in-place screen, this high-performance model looks every bit professional and serious, and the image quality is excellent. The smooth, highly reflective surface offers great brightness, while the closely spaced button snaps ensure that the screen stays taut and mostly wrinkle-free. Plus, it’s available in a wide range of sizes, from 100 to 200 inches diagonally. Setup isn’t as easy as for the other options here, especially for one person, but it doesn’t require any tools and can be done fairly quickly. Unlike with the other screens we tested, with the Yard Master Plus a bit of wind won’t derail the movie.
This screen inflates itself in seconds for easy setup, but you have to contend with fan noise.
May be out of stock
*At the time of publishing, the price was $191.
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 itself isn’t as reflective as that of the Yard Master Plus (though it’s close enough), and it’s harder to get as smooth and wrinkle-free. You 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. It doesn’t come in as many screen sizes as the Yard Master Plus, but you can (usually) get a larger screen for a lower price.
With a high thread count, these white sheets offer solid picture quality for a low price.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $50.
Using a bedsheet is one of the easiest movie-screen options. I’m pretty sure image quality wasn’t what Target was thinking about when naming our budget pick for the best bedsheets, but it turns out the Threshold Performance sheets do offer solid performance as a screen. These white sheets are impressively reflective and produce surprisingly good picture quality, as long as you take the time to secure them and minimize the wrinkles. They’re not as good as either of the actual screens we recommend, but for a fraction of the price they’re a great option for a DIY outdoor theater buff.
The rigid frame and highly reflective screen deliver the most movie-like outdoor theater experience.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $271.
This screen inflates itself in seconds for easy setup, but you have to contend with fan noise.
May be out of stock
*At the time of publishing, the price was $191.
With a high thread count, these white sheets offer solid picture quality for a low price.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $50.
Wirecutter editor-at-large Geoffrey Morrison has been reviewing audio and video gear for 20 years at various magazines and websites, including Home Theater Magazine, CNET, and Sound and Vision. He’s ISF and NIST trained and has used a projector as his main “TV” for over 15 years. He also (conveniently for this guide) has a backyard.
If you want the best and brightest picture quality possible for your outdoor home cinema, you should use an outdoor movie 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 stucco or those clapboards become 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 much more reflective than a wall, so your image is brighter and more accurate.
If you don’t wish to invest in an actual outdoor screen for the occasional backyard movie night, we also recommend a cheap DIY option that offers a step up in picture quality over any wall or garage door.
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 much more reflective than a wall, so your image is brighter and more accurate.
It’s also important to note that these screens 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:
You can find two major types of outdoor movie screens: rigid and inflatable. They both have their strengths and weaknesses.
Rigid screens are two-piece designs with a frame and a screen material that usually attaches via snaps or hooks. This type of screen:
Inflatable screens require less assembly. You just plug in the base, inflate it, and attach the screen. This type of screen:
You can find both rigid and inflatable screens in a rear-projection configuration, in which you place the projector behind the screen. For certain yards this design could solve placement issues, but we think most people prefer to set up the more common projector-in-front-of-the-screen layout.
Both screen types usually come with ground stakes or other supplies to tether the screen in place, and we suggest that you use them (especially with an inflatable screen) because you never know which way the wind will blow. No screen is designed to handle any serious wind, however. For that matter, no outdoor screen is designed to stay outdoors: A metal frame can rust in places, and the electronics in an inflatable screen can corrode and short out when plugged in. These screens are designed to be set up on movie night and then stored indoors until next time.
After compiling a list of available screens in both the rigid and inflatable categories, we narrowed the selection down to one popular screen from each group. To those contenders we added our pick for the best budget sheets, which seemed like a good option between the more expensive dedicated screens and just using the wall of your house.
We evaluated each screen based on the following three criteria:
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. If you have a small, portable, battery-powered projector, the image will be impossible to see on, say, a 200-inch screen. In the Measurements section we provide some rough calculations to help you to figure out what screen size is best for your projector.
At this writing, in July 2020, availability is a big issue for outdoor movie screens. It seems (quite logically, since many movie theaters remain closed) that everyone is buying up every option they can find. Most of the big names routinely get shipments in, though, so if the one you want is out of stock when you take a look, check back regularly.
The rigid frame and highly reflective screen deliver the most movie-like outdoor theater experience.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $271.
Who it’s for: The Elite Screens Yard Master Plus is ideal for someone who doesn’t want to sacrifice picture quality just because they’re sitting outside on their lawn. Also, it’s a good choice if your yard isn’t well protected from gusts of wind.
Why it’s great: The Yard Master Plus delivered the best picture quality outside: In our tests, it did a great job preserving image brightness, and the screen material had minimal wrinkles thanks to the rigid frame. The wide feet kept movement to a minimum, even in a light breeze.
Assembly is fairly straightforward. The frame and legs lock in place without tools, and hand screws attach the legs to the frame. The screen attaches via numerous button snaps. Initially ours had some wrinkles, but the tension on the screen mostly smoothed those out once we mounted it in place.
A nice feature is that the height of the Yard Master Plus screen is adjustable, something that’s not easily possible with many cheap rigid screens and all inflatable screens. The photos we have above show it at the 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 front.
Visually, it looks just like an indoor screen, and in our tests it delivered brightness similar to that of the 1.0-gain screen I use indoors.
Once you’re done with movie night, the entire frame and screen fit inside a wheeled bag that’s about the same volume as a golf club bag.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: It’s a bit of a challenge for one person to assemble this screen, especially if you go with a larger screen size. Our review sample was 200 inches diagonal, which is monstrous. I’m just under 6 feet tall, and even with the frame at its lowest height settings, I needed a stepladder to reach the top of the frame to snap the screen in place.
Even with a bright projector, the 200-inch image was fairly dim, at least compared with the picture from the same projector indoors on a 102-inch screen. This isn’t really a flaw, per se, just something to keep in mind when you’re deciding what size to get. (See the Measurements section below for more details.)
The screen seemed fairly stable on its own, even with a light breeze blowing. Still, I put some extra weight on the feet for my own piece of mind. It also comes with stakes and some thin rope to secure it to softer ground.
Available screen sizes (diagonal): 100, 120, 135, 145, 180, and 200 inches in the 16:9 format Included accessories: carrying case, ground stakes, rope A similar option, if you don’t need the adjustable-height frame: Elite Screens Yard Master (screen sizes from 100 to 200 inches)
This screen inflates itself in seconds for easy setup, but you have to contend with fan noise.
May be out of stock
*At the time of publishing, the price was $191.
Who it’s for: Gemmy’s Airblown Inflatable Deluxe Movie Screen is great for anyone who wants a big screen but doesn’t want to deal with setting up a rigid-frame version.
Why it’s great: It will take longer to wrangle your audience than to set up this screen. The huge inflatable frame basically assembles itself in minutes. Other than plugging in the fans, powering it on, and staking down the frame, there’s not much else you need to do. The 144-inch flexible screen material easily attaches to the frame with big plastic clips. By yourself, it’s a bit of a hassle to do all this, but not impossible; with two people, it’s super easy. When the movie is done, just pull the plug, and the Gemmy deflates in a little longer than it took to inflate.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: When I first thought about getting an outdoor screen, I imagined an inflatable screen floating in my pool. As amusing as this visual was, it’s not a realistic option. These screens use fairly inexpensive materials and are not airtight or watertight. This means the fans that inflate them must run constantly to keep them inflated, and putting one in your pool would be a (ahem) shockingly bad idea. There is some potential danger involved, so proceed with caution. The package comes with tie-downs to keep the screen from blowing into your pool, if you have one, but if the wind is strong enough, it could pull them out. You might want to make sure whatever outlet you use is grounded and has a GFCI, and ideally, you should position the screen far enough from the pool that if it manages to take flight it pulls its plug out before it lands in the water.
In our tests, the Gemmy’s picture quality wasn’t quite as good as that of the Elite Screens model. It’s difficult to get the Gemmy screen completely wrinkle-free, despite its adjustable straps, because there’s nothing rigid to pull against. This is basically a balloon, and there are no straight lines on a balloon. The Airblown also didn’t preserve as much image brightness as the Yard Master Plus, though the difference wasn’t massive. Overall, the image quality on the Gemmy was fine, but on the Elite Screens it was better.
You absolutely need to tie down this screen securely. This is not optional. Because it’s so big and so light, even a slight breeze sets it rocking.
If you can hear your neighbors talking when they’re outside, they’ll be able to hear the fan noise from your screen. It’s not quite the noise level of a vacuum, but it’s not quiet. The sound is akin to that of the inflatable decorations that invade suburban neighborhoods every October and December, though a bit louder because the screen’s fans are larger and there are two of them. Yes, the sound from your speaker will mask some of the fan noise, but if you’re relying on the small speaker inside a projector, the audio is probably going to be hard to hear over the fans.
Screen size (diagonal): 144 inches Dimensions: 12 by 11.5 feet (height by width) Included accessories: storage bag, ground stakes, motorized fans Additional screen sizes: Gemmy sells several other models in different screen sizes (91.7, 149, and 174 inches diagonal) that should offer similar setup, but we did not test their performance.
With a high thread count, these white sheets offer solid picture quality for a low price.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $50.
Who it’s for: In between using a traditional screen adapted for outdoor use and just shining a projected image against a wall, you have some DIY screen possibilities. One of the easiest is a simple white bedsheet. We like Target’s Threshold 400 Thread Count Solid Performance Sheet because it’s color-neutral, less textured than a wall, and quite inexpensive. (We discuss a few other DIY approaches in Other outdoor screen options.)
Why it’s great: A white sheet is an inexpensive choice that, depending on how you hang it, could also work for its actual intended purpose on non-movie nights. At the least, it’s easy to pack up and store in any closet.
Sheets also allow a bit of creative DIYing to fit the screen into a yard in a way that’s easy to do and bespoke to your yard. The trick is making sure the screen doesn’t flap (or flaps minimally) in any wind and stays taut enough to minimize wrinkles. How you do this depends on your particular set of DIY skills. Options include building a full or partial frame out of two-by-fours, sewing in eye holes to hang the sheet from hooks drilled into a wall, thumbtacking it to a porch overhang, or taping it to a wall.
Although these Target sheets were not as good as a “real” screen in our tests, they worked far better than I expected. Image quality and brightness were not bad at all for the price. However, their performance is much more dependent on how and where you mount them. A lot of light bleeds through the sheet material, so if you attach them to a surface that’s reflective, you get a brighter image; if the sheet is just hanging in space with nothing behind it, the image is far dimmer. 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.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: It’s both a positive and a negative that there are so many ways to mount the sheet as a screen. If you’re not sure whether you even own a screwdriver, this might not be the best 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. You certainly have myriad options, all fairly easy and inexpensive, and even just tacking the sheet to a wall is likely to be an improvement over using the wall by itself.
One important thing to consider, regardless of how you’re planning to hang the sheet screen, is that in any sort of wind, the screen will flap. Even if you secure all sides, it’s still one sheet to the wind.
“Screen” sizes: king (large enough for a 126-inch-diagonal screen), queen (large enough for a 119-inch-diagonal screen), full (large enough for a 110-inch-diagonal screen) Other supplies you might need: two-by-fours, nails or screws, thumbtacks, and so on
One of the main reasons to use an actual screen instead of the wall of your house is to preserve image brightness. It’s impossible to reflect all the light from the projector back at your eyes. The amount of light that the screen reflects is called its gain. A screen with a gain of 1.0 reflects the same amount of light as a standardized reflective surface. A screen with higher gain—say, 1.5 or 2.0—appears brighter to someone seated directly in front of the screen but less bright to those off to the side. The opposite is also possible: A less reflective screen material—a matte gray paint, for instance—absorbs more of the light and reflects less, so it has a lower gain, such as 0.7. With all screens, indoors and out, it’s important to find the right level of gain so that the image will be bright but not produce a brighter spot in the center of the screen (called hotspotting) and impact the image for people sitting off-center.
Gain also directly impacts how large a screen you can feasibly have. As your screen size goes up, brightness decreases. It does this according to the screen area, not the diagonal or width. For example, increasing your screen size from 100 inches to 145 inches (two sizes available for the Elite Screens Yard Master Plus) doubles the area and results in an image that’s half as bright. If your projector isn’t especially bright to begin with, this effect could make the picture hard to see.
With all screens, indoors and out, it’s important to find the right level of gain so that the image will be bright but not produce a brighter spot in the center of the screen (called hotspotting) and impact the image for people sitting off-center.
To measure how well these outdoor screens preserved brightness, I first used a Minolta LS-100 light meter and measured how much brightness I got from a projector on my 1.0-gain, 102-inch Stewart Filmscreen indoor screen. Then I used this same projector outside, on the three screens in our test group.
There was one major difference, of course: It wasn’t completely dark outside. I live in Los Angeles, and even at its darkest, the outdoors is not dark. So a bit of math was in order. I first measured the brightness of the screen with the projector off, to create a baseline, and then subtracted this reading from what I got with the projector on; this is sort of like zeroing out your kitchen scale with an empty bowl on it. The process gave us some fairly accurate brightness measurements to compare with our initial readings indoors. The difference in brightness between our indoor reference screen and the outdoor screens (adjusted for screen size) represented the gain, as listed in the table below.
Additionally, we made 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 (other than ANSI) are misleading at best and laughable at worst. But it will give you a general idea. In addition, the age of your projector’s lamp is a huge factor in determining how bright your projector actually is—even a few hundred hours could mean your projector is significantly dimmer than its rated specs. The short version is, if you have a bright home theater projector, it would be fairly dim on a 200-inch screen. If you have a low-brightness 500-lumen portable projector, it would be nearly unwatchable on a 200-inch screen.
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 in the fairly bright Los Angeles night. If your area is darker, you could get away with a bit less.
A wall: The free option is as good as it costs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using a wall or garage door for a screen, but it’s the worst-looking choice by far. While watching your movie, you see every texture on the surface, no matter how smooth it seems at first glance, and this effect can be quite distracting. A real screen probably offers better brightness, too, which may allow you to project a larger image.
Tripod “slide show” screens: You might remember old-school tripod-style screens—the pull-down or pull-up variety that was ubiquitous in classrooms for decades. Many of these screens are in 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 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: Some readers of our post about setting up an outdoor DIY 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 some 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, I imagine 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 better.
Other DIY options include a 4-by-8 sheet of oriented strand board, which when 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 OSB. Particle board with a melamine surface wouldn’t require painting, though I’d be careful about bumping the edges during storage between movie nights.
Camp Chef Outdoor Big Screen: The Camp Chef was a model we initially considered calling in to test, but it was consistently out of stock. It’s on the small side for an outdoor screen, at “only” 92 inches diagonally. That’s still pretty big, though, and that may be the best size for use with a dimmer projector. The Camp Chef has a rigid frame, and it seems like you can pull the screen quite taut. This model is also less expensive than the 100-inch version of the Elite Screens Yard Master Plus. According to Fakespot, most of the reviews leading to the current 4.4-star (out of five) Amazon rating are real.
JWSIT Projector Screen with Stand: The JWSIT is another promising screen we considered but had to skip due to availability. It measures 120 inches diagonally, has a rigid frame, and can serve as a rear- or front-projection screen. Most of the Amazon reviews appear to be fake, however.
VivoHome Inflatable Projection Screen: The VivoHome comes in two sizes: 14 and 18 feet. Those stated sizes are misleading, however, because they’re including the inflatable frame, not just the screen. The 14-foot version has a screen that’s roughly 117 inches diagonal, while the 18-foot version is roughly 165 inches. We could not call in either option due to availability. The screen is attached with clips that have adjustable straps, so overall the VivoHome is likely to have the same pros and cons as the Gemmy Airblown.
by Geoffrey Morrison and Adrienne Maxwell
by Grant Clauser and Adrienne Maxwell
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