If you’ve finally got your head straight around over LCD, Plasma, OLED screens and SED technology…Well, get ready for the new laser screens by Mitsubishi.
Arasor International and Novalux joined forces with Mitsubishi to develop a commercial television that uses colored lasers to display bright, deep images on large, thin, lightweight screens. The technology behind these new lovelies still involves rear-projection or DLP (Digital Light Processing) but whereas in the past this technology used white-light mercury lamps as the TV’s light source, it now uses separate red, green and blue lasers in conjunction with a HDTV chip.
“What difference does it make?” you will ask. On a conventional rear-projection screen, the light coming from a high-intensity bulb illuminates a DMD matrix (Digital Micromirror Device) made of about 2 million mirrors facing thousands of directions in a single milli-second. The reflected light is then goes through a tiny lens and is displayed on the screen. The problem with conventional bulbs is they’re power-hungry, they heat up, they’re heavy and bulky but don’t have a broad enough color spectrum.
Mr. DeMartin said laser televisions would use a third of the power of conventional, large-screen models that depend on high-power lamps. In such television, he said, the lamps are required to be on full power whenever the sets that use them are on. But Mitsubishi’s new lasers, which are based on semiconductors, turn on and off when needed.
So that’s why Mitsubishi and partners came up with the idea of increasing the number of colors in the light source to broaden the color spectrum displayed on the screen. Whereas the best rear-projection screens available today display no more than 30% of the colors perceived by the human eye, the laser technology boosts this figure to 90%! Not only does this technology significantly increase brightness levels but in the same time it reduces weight, bulkiness and power consumption.
A 52-inch model is scheduled for end 2007 according to various sources.