In the last few years projectors have become a crucial part of our lives because we need to do a lot of things for us. Present in classrooms, business rooms and even used for conference calls, we wouldn’t just be able to make presentations the same way without them. We’ve all been in school and most likely we all know the frustration of trying to work with a projector that doesn’t want to do anything for us.
So in order to make the most out of a projector, it is crucial to understand a little bit about it and as such, we need to look at different kinds of projectors. In this article, we are going to look at the difference between an LCD projector and a DLP projector.
DLP Projectors
These appeared I the market in the 1980s, and have been used ever since then. They basically rely on a digital micromirror device (DMD) to work, and this device is made of up to two million tiny little mirrors. Every single one of these tiny mirrors can adjust on its own, in order to reproduce a darker or lighter pixel. But in order to obtain color, a beam of light that goes through a color wheel passes through the DMD, delivering colors to your final projection.
Regarding the color wheel, it has basic color support with colors such as red blue and green as a necessity, but some other more advanced wheels can support complex colors such as magenta, yellow and cyan. Most DLP projectors can reproduce up to 16,7 million colors,, but the most advance ones can go up 35 trillion colors (yes, there are that many colors!). The human eye can only distinguish about 10 million different colors, so these projectors are delivering way too much color for us.
LCD Projectors
Just like DLP projectors these have been around since the 1980s. LCD stands for “Liquid Crystal Display” and it is exactly what is used to reproduce images in watches and phones, for example. LCD projectors use three liquid crystal displays to create an image through a process. The process starts with a light source throwing a beam of white light at the three mirrors that will in turn shape and reflect a certain wavelength of said light. Each mirror reflects red, blue and green and this reflection is then fed to an LCD panel that tells how to arrange the pixels to create the image.
All three LCD panels arrange the same image but in different ways because of the light that goes through the panel. These three images are then combined into one image that can have up to 16.7 million colors. That is then your final projection, still above the amount of colors the human eye can see.