What is a Pull Down Screen?

If you have a home theater set up, a pull down screen is a nice option to have. This way you don't have to worry about the screen getting torn or used as a big coloring page by your kids.

It all depends on how your system is set up. One of my friends has a projection screen he borrows from his work to watch movies on when all of the family is home.

They have one large blank wall in their basement and they use this as their screen. It works great and the picture is clear.

If you don't have a big screen TV and have several people gathered around, it is nice to have a big area to watch a movie on.

You probably get better quality when it is on an actual screen, but using a blank wall is a good option if you don't have a screen.

We have a projector pull down screen in our conference room at work that comes in very handy for presentations.

This is a motorized screen which works so much better than the old manual pull down screen we used to have. Either way it is nice to have the screen out of the way we we aren't using it.

I remember my dad having a portable projection screen he would use for slide presentations. When this screen was folded down, you could carry it around with you.

Once you set it up, there were tripod legs that unfolded to keep it steady. Every once in awhile we get out our old family slides and use that screen to look at all of our old family photos.

I remember the pull down screen from school. It was rolled up like toilet paper around a center rod that was attached by supports to the wall above the chalkboard.

Whenever the teacher needed to project slides onto the screen, she would pull it down across the chalkboard. It was high enough that everyone could see it over each other’s heads.

I thought it was neat and efficient how she could roll it back up and immediately use the space beneath it for writing. I lived in a small, cramped house, so I noticed any efficient uses of space.

The conference room in my office building has a motorized screen for presentations. This prevents people from accidentally pulling it off its base or tearing it somehow. They never have to touch the actual screen. All they have to do is push a button.

Employees are expected to go into the room and push the button to bring the screen down before everyone else arrives at the meeting. The boss says it’s unprofessional to make everyone wait while the screen lowers. He’s all about time management and efficiency.

The screen is a little slow to lower and raise. You can hear the whirr of the motor in a quiet room.

The boss also wants us to wait until everyone has left the meeting to raise the screen. I don’t really know why, but in his head, it is rude to run the motor in front of everyone.

My husband and I are friends with a couple who love showing their vacation photos and home movies on a projection screen. They used to have one that didn’t pull down, but their hyper toddlers and teething puppies left rips and tears in it, and they invested in a retractable screen.

I will admit that it gets kind of boring looking at their family documentaries, but they are just so proud of them that I would never hurt their feelings by refusing to watch them. Now that they have the retractable screen, it’s easier to look at the shots. We have a clear view with no rips.

My church has a pull down projection screen. We use it so the congregation can see lyrics to songs that are not in the hymnals.

When our church started, we received some old hymnals as a donation from another church. However, a lot of traditional church songs were not included in these hymnals, and people wanted to sing them.

So, I wrote down the lyrics on transparencies and used the projector to shine them on the screen for the crowd to follow along. After we are through singing, I pull the cord to retract the screen so that no one is distracted by it during the service.

Tip for pull-down screens - make sure the cord is long enough! I am very short. I once gave a presentation in a classroom that had a pull-down projector screen. I wanted to use the white board, but the person who used the room before me had left the screen pulled down in front of it.

So I pulled the cord and raised it, but I ran out of arm before the screen was all the way up. Nervously, I let go of the cord and let the screen snap back into place.

The force of the snap caused the screen to come loose from the ceiling. It fell and crashed to the floor, missing my head by no more than six inches. Yowza!