Phil Laney is from Digital Projection Inc (DPI). The company invented the DLP with TI in the 1990s, Laney said. His topic was wide colour and by this he meant ‘beyond Rec. 709’.
There are new sources for wider colour gamut such as UltraHD Blu-ray Disks. Laney went through the gamuts from Rec.709. Rec 709 can cover around a third of all colours that can be seen, while P3 (which was built around what Xenon lamps could do) covers around 50%. Rec. 2020 can cover around ¾ of all colors. Only RGB lasers and the DPI dual LED projector can get close to the full Rec 2020 gamut.
The Insight 4K Dual LED projector covers around 90% of Rec 2020. The projector has two banks of LEDs with the 4K cinema chip and LEDs are closely binned and narrow bandwidth. Finding the correct content to show what is available is the tricky thing, Laney said.
Wide colour space support is important because of new Blu-ray players – and you need to differentiate vs FPDs, especially in home theatres if you want to sell projectors. With a wide gamut, the image is less ‘washed out’ looking and that can be important in simulation, Laney said. It’s often difficullt to maintain colour in multi channel setups. DPI has been able to achieve brightness close to 3K lumens with a three chip system based on LED light sources.
Brightness falls off quite flatly over time and depends on cooling and power application. Using data from the LED makers, DPI calculates that red would be 83% of starting brightness after 50K hours at 60º C, while green was 90% at 100º. The projector has a liquid-cooling system and in practice, DPI has found that its design runs cooler than this, so should get even less degradation and so the projector should have a very long life.
DPI is aiming at the high end of the home cinema market. It is not developing direct laser, but LED and Laser Phosphor.
Analyst Comment
DPI had a projector at the event. It’s big for a 3,000 lumen projector, but the colour performance looked very good to us, with very saturated colours. (BR)
