Keeping Your Outdoor Theater Screening Safe

We’re proud of the fact that our QuikScreens and outdoor theater systems are so easy to use, but you still need to consider safety and proper usage during your screening. Here are some basic best practices to make absolutely sure your guests -- and components -- don’t come to any accidental grief:

Manage your cables. Even a simple system like ours involves a few cables -- cables connecting the audio and video components to each other, and cables connecting the system to a power source. If you’re receiving your signal from a cable box, you may end up needing to connect an additional cable that snakes all the way from your home out to the projector. Keep these cables away from your guests’ feet, unless you want to cause a painful fall. If there’s no way to avoid placing a cable where someone will walk over it, tape it down or lay a rug over it.

Watch the eyes. It’s absolutely critical that you warn your guests never to look directly into the light from the projector. Even the low-powered lamp used for indoor projectors is sufficient to cause blindness, and our projectors are bright enough to fill a large outdoor screen. If they’re dumb enough to look anyway, well, at least you told them not to.

Let the projector cool. This affects the projector’s well-being more than that of your guests, but it’s important if you want your event to go well and your projector lamp to last. These lamps get very hot over the course of a screening, and they need help from the projector’s internal fan to cool down properly afterward -- otherwise they may explode or suffer a drastically shortened lifespan. So let the projector complete its cool-down phase (it will stop on its own) before unplugging projector power.