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Engineers in China have built a laser digital cinema projector
The first laser TV is set to go on sale soon in North America, but engineers from the Academy of Opto-Electronics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Phoebus Vision Opto-Electronics, in Beijing, say they’ve already brought the eye-popping color of laser-generated images to the big screen with a digital cinema projector that uses lasers as the light source. The team combined several lasers with the MEMS technology used in digital projectors today. They describe the device in September’s Journal of Display Technology .
The technology “will be the next generation of cinema display,” says Yong Bi, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief technology officer at Phoebus, which is commercializing the projector. However, others in the industry question whether laser cinema will be ready in time and inexpensive enough to catch much of the market.
Bi’s projector replaces the white light and color filters used in today’s digital projectors with several red, green, and blue lasers. The lasers illuminate a digital micromirror device, a MEMS chip invented by Texas Instruments. The chip has an array of microscopic mirrors that each correspond to a pixel on the screen. The chip turns the pixels on or off by tilting the mirrors to direct light either toward or away from the screen.
