Johannesburg, 12 Mar 2009
The great videotape wars of the 1980s took place between Betamax and VHS. Then there were the DVD wars of the 1990s, and now there's the digital format showdown between Blue-ray and HD. But the projector technologies war is complicating things for consumers choosing a home entertainment projector, says Albert Fayard, GM of Epson SA.
Fayard believes 3LCD is the most popular projector technology available on the market, citing Tree Consulting, a source for projector information worldwide: “More than 69% of all projectors sold worldwide are 3LCD projectors”.
“3LCD projectors pass light through liquid crystal displays (LCDs), about the size of a R5 coin, and then use the projector's lens to expand the smaller detail in an image projected onto a screen or wall. This gives it the ability to project a clear image, showing more detail and allowing for smoother motion on screen,” he says.
“3LCD technology takes colour differentiation to another level, resulting in a faithful reproduction of subtle colour changes in a projected image. These projectors are less likely to encounter 'dither noise', or an unnatural gradient of colour change brought on by a limited colour palette, presenting much more natural-looking images on-screen.”
Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology, he says, is a more complicated display solution, using digital optical semi-conductors (DLP chip) to manipulate light.
“These chips each contain a rectangular array of up to two million tiny mirrors and, when placed in a projector, are able to project a totally digital image onto anything, up to and including massive cinema screens,” he explains.
Fayard also notes that although more complex, DLP's versatility can be seen in both colour and greyscale applications - capable of projecting up to 1 024 different shades of grey and up to 36 trillion colours in a three-chip cinema system.
Both are good technologies, but according to Epson, 3LCD technology is superior, because DLP cannot recreate subtle colour changes and has more 'dither noise'.
Fayard says, much like the Betamax versus VHS wars, the technology that will become the favourite will depend on how effective the marketing campaigns around each technology are. Sony's Betamax was far superior to JVC's VHS format, he believes, but the powerful and effective marketing campaign around cost and recording time on VHS saw it becoming the de facto standard for home video cassettes and video machines.
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