Breakthroughs in LED Illumination

Solid state lighting (SSL) of many kinds are rapidly vying to replace lamps as the source in projection solutions.  In the market today are:

• LED projectors
• RGB Laser projectors
• Laser-Phosphor projectors
• Hybrid (LED and laser) projectors

Each SSL technology enables certain capabilities with advantages and disadvantages.  LED projectors suffer from a lack of luminance for many applications, while RGB laser projectors are too expensive for mainstream applications.

At last year’s Display Summit, we had a demo that showed lamp-based projectors side by side with laser-phosphor projectors to validate that the performance is equivalent, but with many added advantages like much long light source lifetime and no mounting restrictions.

RGB laser systems have now been in the market for a year and continue to roll out.  These will be discussed primarily in the Digital Cinema panel session.

But LED and Hybrid solutions have not generated as much buzz lately.  That is about to change as Philips Lighting has developed a new LED-based light source that can allow much brighter projector for mainstream applications.  But in addition, projectors using this SSL source can create bight, colorful and accurate images in rooms with normal ambient illumination – even on matte white unity gain screens.  I know because I just helped do a survey with 300 people judging perceived image quality in a blind test of four projectors – one of which contained the new HDL SSL technology.  You will want to learn about this.