JM-Laser Technology (JM-LT) gave an impressive talk describing their RGB laser sources that have been integrated into 53 cinema screens in China so far, cooperating with Oristar. That’s a lot at this stage of the market.
They call their solution LRGB for laser RGB or Phasor Free, which we think means ‘speckle free’. The company emphasized the work it has done to reduce speckle. They showed speckle contrast results for the red, blue, green and white images that were all around 3%, which is a level that is generally accepted for cinema (although measurement methods vary).
JM-LT can configure RGB laser light sources in the 30-60W range for home theater, e-theater, laser light shows and business projectors. For cinemas, engineering applications and larger special projection projects, they can bundle 130W laser modules as needed up to about 60K lumens.
A 10K lumen projector needs about 487 Watt of electrical power of which 120W is devoted to thermal management. The overall wall plug efficiency is 9.1% Lm/W, JM-LT said. That compares to a standard Xenon light source that has a 5.2% wall plug efficiency, so it’s nearly twice as efficient. Lifetime of the source is rated at 20K hours to 80% of initial brightness.
One issue the firm has noticed is that the three colors decay differently over time so they have developed an automated white balance system to keep the white point at D65.
At the end of the talk, the company revealed that it is developing the RGB laser source for a new set of home theater projectors to be offered by Sim2 called iLEP. These will be 3-chip DLP platforms using a 0.95” chip and will be offered in 3, 7 and 10K lumen versions, but only with 1080p resolution.
