DLP is the acronym for Digital Light Processing television, and was invented by Texas Instruments in 1987. The technology as such is very simple, and is a carry forward of the CRT televisions that were in use till then.
In a DLP television, light passes through a rotating wheel that has the three primary colors, red, green and blue. This light is then reflected off a mirror on to a DMD (Digital Micromirror Device) which is basically a device that has a number of small mirrors in it. Each of these mirrors will represent one pixel on the projected image, although very often the DMD will have only half as many mirrors as the pixels due to a feature called wobulation.
Each of the mirrors on the DMD can be positioned very rapidly so that this light can be reflected into a lens that blows up the image, or on to a “light dump” that absorbs the light. By toggling the direction in which these mirrors face, greyscales can be produced depending on the ratio of light reflected into the lens to the ratio of light directed to the light dump.
The DLP system gives much better color rendering than other systems and are actually a direct competition to other newer technologies like the TFT and plasma screen televisions. In fact earlier the DLP system used to have only around one revolution of the color wheel per second. Nowadays you get up to 10 revolutions per second and sometimes more than one wheel which allow the manufacturer to combine two different colors to get a wider range of colors than possible earlier.
The biggest problem with the DLP system is that the light source has to be from a metal halide lamp, and these are very expensive. Metal halide lamps last an average of around 20,000 hrs., but the lamps in the DLP television last much less than this. Most DLP televisions have an end of life light that intimates to the user that the lamp has reached the end of its life.
Usually this happens between 5 and 7 yrs. after the television has been purchased depending on the usage. A new bulb also costs in the region of $300 making them very expensive. The newer DLP televisions however have LED’s inside. The LED DLP televisions use LED’s as their light source which simplifies matters considerably.
This is because LED’s come in red, green and blue, which means that you don’t have to have the spinning color wheel. Not only this, but the life of LED’s is much longer too with some people estimating that they will last 25 to 30 yrs. This also removes the extra expense that you will have of replacing the bulb.
As of now the only problem with LED DLP TV is their price and the fact that they are not widely manufactured. Only a couple of manufacturers use LED technology, and until they become more mainstream, their price is sure to remain high. They are however gaining acceptance very fast and the time is not too long in the future where they will become affordable to the vast majority of us.
View the original article here
Visit LightingShowroom.com for all your home lighting needs.
See all LightingShowroom.com Press releases here.
No comments:
Post a Comment