New York Times: Mitsubishi Harnesses Colored Lasers to Produce New-Generation Lightweight HDTV

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03hdtv.html?ex=1301716800&en=00dcf2d24530e989&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss' target='_blank'>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03hdtv.html?ex=1301716800&en=00dcf2d24530e989&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss</a><br /><br /></div><i>"As if shopping for new flat-panel, high-definition television is not hard enough, Mitsubishi is scheduled to announce this week that it has developed commercial television that uses colored lasers to display bright, deep images on large, thin, lightweight screens — surpassing images seen on film. The television sets, which Mitsubishi is calling the first of their kind, are expected to reach stores sometime late next year. A design prototype of Mitsubishi's big-screen TV, to be shown Friday. At the heart of the first generation of this new television is an existing rear-projection technology called digital light processing. In the past, this technology, developed by Texas Instruments, used white-light mercury lamps as the television's light source. With laser television, separate red, green and blue lasers are used in conjunction with an HDTV chip, said Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mitsubishi-nyt-03mit395.jpg" /><br /><br />It's fascinating watching the TV wars raging around all these different formats - SED looks awesome (if they ever arrive) but this new DLP-variant looks eqaully compelling. I'm not shopping for a new TV yet - my current Samsung DLP is still a great TV - but I can see myself shopping for a replacement down the road (2010 or so).

[jeffd]

wow, never heard of this type of display technology. But if its image quality is so great, wouldnt it be better then lcd/plasma technology in both price and reliability? Not sure how the laser is controled to scan the screen, but We should beable to say good bye to dead pixles.

[Felix Torres]

wow, never heard of this type of display technology. But if its image quality is so great, wouldnt it be better then lcd/plasma technology in both price and reliability? Not sure how the laser is controled to scan the screen, but We should beable to say good bye to dead pixles.

Standard DLP chips use an array of tiny mirrors on a chip to reflect light from a high-power light source which then passes through a rotating color wheel (usually at something like 7000-10000 rpm). The mirrors oscilate in synch with the wheel so they are on or off as appropriate for each color of the wheel. Persistence of vision then blends the color images into the appropriate shades of color for each pixel.

Back at CES2006 in january several companies announced LED light-source rear projection systems where the rotating wheel and light source are replaced by a trio of LEDs that blink on and off in sequence to produce three colored images through the DLP chip.

Expectations were that laser-driven systems would be available in '07.
Mitsubishi seems to be ready to jump ahead of their rivals by about a year.

Of course, given the fact that Mitsubishi's past rear projectors are reported to be uniformly incapable of properly de-interlacing 1080i content, I'd wait until they cleaned up their act on the electronics side before considering any TV with their logo on it.

The tech itself is clean, though; all-solid-state, no moving parts except the contrast-enhancing iris on the optical system (if they even choose to use one) and, best of all, the light-source is rated at the lifetime of the device.

So yes, these rear-projection systems are indeed viable alternatives to flat panels (for the 71% of flat panel buyers that *don't* wall-mount) and they are generally way cheaper than anything else at the larger sizes (60-75"). They're also very light and relatively low on power consumption compared to Plasma panels.

This is very good news; it'll force competitors to move up their LED- and laser-driven models.

Oh, BTW, one advantage of laser-driven DLPs is that the lasers and DLP work beautifully with wobulation to produce super-high res displays at minimal extra cost; expect to see QUAD-HD DLP's by next year...
Fun!

As for dead pixels; not quite. DLPs also (theoretically) can develop dead pixels. But instead of stuck or dead sub-pixels, they just go black. Its all a matter of quality-control and TI is very good at making the chips and testing them, for obvious reasons.

[jeffd]

Ah, so it uses a chip of mirrors to create an entire frame at once (also that spinning color wheel is a moving part. :/ I hope they stick it someplace where it can be easily removed and replaced by the user) rather then a line scanning system.

How much is thickness increased over LCD? Just enough to be troublesome on walls?