If you"ve been thinking about buying a home theater projector
and read reviews or done a little bit of research, you"ll be
aware that there are two technologies competing for the contents
of your wallet.

Both LCD and DLP are used in projectors suitable for home
theaters, but they work in quite different ways and produce
slightly different results. If you ask around "� particularly in
electronics stores, you"re likely to be provided with a mass of
information that"s confusing and often just plain wrong. So
here, in an effort to clear the fog surrounding projectors, is
our guide to LCD v DLP.

LCD

LCD projectors have three separate LCD panels, one for red, one
for green, and one for blue components of the image being
processed by the projector. As light passess through the LCD
panels, individual pixels (or picture elements) can be either
opened or closed to either allow light to pass through or be
filtered out. In this way the light is modulated and an image
projected on to the screen.

LCD projectors have historically had three main advantages over
DLP. They produce more accurate colors (due to the three
separate LCD panels), they produce a slightly sharper image
(although this is as good as undetectable when watching movies)
and they are more light-efficient, which means they produce
brighter images using less power.

However, LCD projectors also have some disadvantages, although
as the technology improves these are becoming less and less
relevant. The first of these is pixelation, or what"s known as
the screen door effect. This means that sometimes you can see
the individual pixels and it looks as though you are viewing the
image through a "�screendoor." The second historic disadvantage
of LCD v DLP is that LCD doesn"t produce absolute black, which
means that contrast is less than you would get with DLP.

However, the advent of higher resoltion LCD projectors
(particularly "�HD-ready" projectors which have a horizontal
resolution of 768 pixels or greater) means that pixelation is
less of a problem than it used to be. And the improved ability
of LCDs to produce high-contrast images is also allowing them to
be taken more seriously by home theater enthusiasts.

DLP

Digital Light Processing (DLP) is a technology developed by
Texas Instruments and it works by projecting light from the
projector"s lamp onto a DLP chip, made up of thousands of tiny
mirrors. Each mirror represents a single pixel and directs the
light projected onto it either into the lens path to turn the
pixel on or away from it to turn it off. Most DLP projectors
have only one chip, so in order to reproduce color, a color
wheel consisting of red, green, blue and sometimes, white
filters is used. The wheel spins between the lamp and the chip
and changes the color of the light hitting the chip from red, to
green, blue. Each mirror on the DLP chip tilts towards or away
from the lens path depending on how much of a particular colour
light is required for that pixel at any given instant.

The key advantages DLP has in the LCD v DLP debate is that DLP
projectors tend to be smaller and lighter, have better contrast,
and don"t suffer the same pixelation problems as LCD projectors.
There is one problem that some users report with DLP projectors,
although it appears to only affect a very small number of
people. Because of the way DLP works, at any given instant, the
image on screen is either red, green, or blue. However, the
images change so quickly, that the human eye doesn"t detect this
and your brain puts the red, green and blue images together to
make a complete frame of video. Unfortunately, some people can
see the individual colours, and others can detect them enough to
cause eye-strain and headaches. However, technology has improved
significantly with the introduction of six-color wheels and
faster rotation speeds. The rainbow effect should be a problem
for even fewer people. The best way to find out if you"re
affected is to try out a DLP projector, perhaps by hiring one,
before you buy.

Technology in both LCD and DLP projectors is improving all the
time. However, at the time of writing DLP still has a slight
edge in the home theater market.

About the author:
Kenny Hemphill is the editor and publisher of href="http://www.the-hdtv-tuner.com">The HDTV Tuner

Author : Kenny Hemphill
Site : www.goarticles.com

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