Mitsubishi DLP Cube - DLP Video Wall Cubes, DLP Projection Walls by Mitsubishi MegaView

DLP® Technology vs. Others

What is DLP® Technology?

DLP® is a technology created by Texas Instruments and stands for its Digital Light Processing™ technology. With its 100,000 hour MTBF and consistent performance, it has become the industry-standard display technology used for 24 hour / 7 day a week operation.

At the heart of this system is the Digital Micromirror Device™ (DMD™), which uses hundreds of thousands of microscopic mirrors to generate images onto the display screen. Because the image generating DMD™ chip is a 100% reflective technology as opposed to transmissive, it is able to withstand a tremendous amount of heat and light. This ensures that the display maintains the same superb image quality throughout the life of the unit.

There are two different kinds of DLP® technology available: Single Chip and Three Chip. For rear projection cubes technology, Single Chip DLP® technology is utilized because of space and cost constraints of a tiled display wall.

A Single Chip DLP® projection engine utilizes four main components: Light Source, Color Filter, DMD and Projection Lens. The light source generates the light necessary to project an image on a screen. The Color Filter, also referred to as a Color Wheel, generates color by filtering the white light generated from the light source. The DMD is a monochromatic imaging device, so the color wheel adds red, green and blue light to sequentially generate each primary color. This occurs rapidly giving the appearance of a full color image.

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Smooth Picture

To reduce the cost of a single chip DLP® projection engine, Texas Instruments has implemented a technology called Smooth Picture. This technology, also referred to as Wobulation, takes half of the desired native resolution of a DMD chip and oscillates it back and forth to give the appearance of full native resolution.

Because the native resolution of a Smooth Picture device is smaller than the XGA and SXGA+ resolutions of most data images, these images are reproduced with only half of the information at any give instant. While the Smooth Picture process reproduces an image that the eye perceives as full resolution, this process is not able to display the full resolution all at once and has a tendency to create a soft image. This approach works well for typical video signals, but the net loss of resolution and sharpness can affect how computer data and graphics are displayed.

Below are examples of the same image content shown on two different displays, one utilizing Smooth Picture technology and the other a native SXGA+ DMD™ chip . The SXGA+ unit utilizes one micromirror per signal pixel, matching the signal resolution and enabling a sharp and correct high resolution image. Smooth Picture processing has two pixels that share one mirror, creating a softer image with perceived high resolution.