Written on June 20, 2008 – 8:52 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Together with the Optoma Pico projector that uses a TI chipset, TI itself decided to announce "industry's first home-theater lamp-free projector." Say goodbye to those tedious lamps that could only last several thousands of hours. The future projectors, just like the new TI one will use a PhlatLight LED illumination source. TI’s lamp-free projector also comes equipped with a Brilliantcolor chipset to facilitate the display of 1080p content. The inclusion of the Brilliantcolor chipset raises the color gamut to as much as 50% over traditional projector tech, amounting to more than 200 trillion colors. Moreover, the contrast ratio has been improved and can go up to 500,000:1.

The new LED source does not require expensive new bulbs, as LEDs are known to consume far less power so you'll pay for less electricity if you're a heavy projector user. TI also announced that their new technology will be implemented in DLP products later this year.

By the looks of it, projectors tend to slowly gain on current LCD and plasma display technologies. I still think that flat panel displays won’t be able to keep up with the projectors, which will eventually become more affordable and eliminate the traditional panels. Even more so, flat panel manufacturers will have to squeeze more and more pixels into the current standard diagonals in order to provide Super Hi-Vision resolutions, and that wouldn’t prove cost effective at all.