If you’re putting in a golf simulator, you’re probably spending hours pouring over reviews of the latest launch monitor tech. Perhaps you’ve scoped out just how many lumens you need your projector to pump out, or just how powerful a graphics card your PC needs to be packing. Those are all good things to research, but don’t sleep on the necessity of buying the right impact screen.
Beware Golf Simulator Bounce Back
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, which is something a really smart guy once said that seems to apply here. When you unleash the full fury of your driver swing and mash a ball in your golf simulator, the ball must go somewhere once it hits the screen. How far it comes back might seem like a trivial issue but take stock of your setup. Never mind the possibility (however remote) of it coming back at you. If your golf simulator is in a garage, chances are somewhere in your build the turf runs out and meets concrete floor. Do you really want to chase your Titleist across the garage floor? Do you have other stuff in the garage (like maybe a vehicle) that wouldn’t respond well to a golf ball bouncing back at it?
The solution here is a triple-layer screen. Many indoor golf stores will sell entry-level screens and offer a premium version for a markup, and you’ll find the main difference is the triple layer feature. Pay the mark up. Yes, you could probably hang some blankets and achieve some suppression of the bounce back phenomenon, but this is your often-dreamt-about golf simulator! Don’t go cheap!
Noise Control
So, where are you putting your golf simulator? The popular locations tend to be the garage, the basement, or maybe the odd loft. Wherever you’re putting it, odds are noise is a consideration. If you successfully approached the throne and got your significant other to sign off on a golf simulator, the last thing you want is for them to regret that decision with every noisy blast from your simulator. Chances are your time to use the sim is limited, and your windows to use it are probably right when the kids need to be doing homework, the spouse’s show is on, or maybe even when somebody is trying to sleep.
Here again, cough up the extra pesos and get the triple-layer. The additional layering absorbs much of the noise and substantially reduces the volume of your drives smashing against the screen. This may seem like a trivial detail, but taking the additional steps and investing in some noise suppression can go a long way towards ensuring the rest of your household enjoys (or maybe tolerates) your new golf simulator.
Get the Size Right
Perhaps most important of all, make sure you get the size right. Whether a custom screen or part of a do-it-yourself enclosure setup, you must ensure the screen fits in the space you’ve earmarked for your golf simulator. (You generally want to leave a foot of space between the wall and the screen.) What many fail to consider regarding size is how the screen works with your projector. Most projectors can show your image in multiple aspect ratios, but if you must scale down the resolution to fit the screen you will end up sacrificing picture quality.
In most cases you’ll be positioning your projector to fit your screen top to bottom, then using the projector’s features and the PC graphics card to manipulate the image into a perfect corner-to-corner fit. Those manipulations are what degrades image quality, so do the homework to make sure you’re getting a screen size that will minimize the need to jump through those hoops.
Other Considerations
If your plans for your golf simulator involve it doubling as a movie theater (“see honey, it’s not for me, it’s for the whole family”) that’s even more reason to make sure you’re matching screen size with projector capabilities. Depending on how you stream your movies, you may not be able to rely on your PC’s graphics card to make it fit.
One other tip: once your screen is up and the simulator is running, make sure you are only hitting clean golf balls off clean golf clubs. A dirty golf ball hit at speed can literally burn a stain into your screen, which makes for a bit of a movie-watching buzzkill.
Your choice of golf simulator screen might seem like the easy part of your sim build, but there are important factors to consider. You are not in “any old screen will do” territory. You must manage bounce-back and noise, and ensure you’ve accounted for all sizing considerations when picking your impact screen.