Chinese projector maker XGIMI reckons it's come up with a best of both worlds solution for projector light sources by combining the high color fidelity and comfortable viewing experience of LED technology with the high brightness chops of laser.
"For a long time, there have been different opinions about brightness," noted the company in a recent blog post. "Many people say that the higher the brightness of the projection, the better; some people will say that they watch movies/TV shows at night, and the brightness is too high, which is too dazzling and uncomfortable. XGIMI has always been very firm: Comfortable look and feel and accurate color are the cornerstones of improving the brightness of home projection."
For the past few years, XGIMI's engineers have been looking into a number of solutions – including single laser light sources as found in its Aura UST model, triple-color setups where red, green and blue colors each get their own light source, and full-color LEDs. There are pros and cons to each.
The single laser solution offers relatively high brightness, but can suffer in color reproduction and image quality. The tri-color laser is also bright while being more color-rich, but during its investigations XGIMI discovered that the technology can "produce an image that is often perceived as frosty and grainy and a color fringing problem that makes text and graphics appear glaring and blurred" and that "due to the physical characteristics of the three-color laser, these problems can only be suppressed to varying degrees, and cannot be completely solved."
A full-color LED offered more natural color reproduction as well as improved viewing comfort at a relatively low cost, but overall brightness just couldn't compete with the laser solutions.
Now XGIMI has essentially harnessed the advantages of both LED and laser light sources by developing a new full-color LED lamp bead designed to match the wavebands of the onboard laser light source, and then combined the two via a five-channel hybrid optical light path design.
This Dual Light Technology is reported to achieve an "average level of Delta E of around one in mass production." The company points out that the color standard value in many big-screen TVs comes in at around two or three, and that projectors can get as high a seven or eight (in this case, higher is not better). And while some manufacturers do claim color accuracy value as low as 0.9, in-house testing at XGIMI found actual measurements to be significantly higher.
XGIMI's new hybrid light source technology's low Delta E value has enabled accuracy certification from bodies such as Switzerland's SGS and TÜV Süd in Germany. The color gamut spans 95.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and 99.9% of the BT.709 space, while brightness comes in at 2,300 ISO lumens.
The first projectors built around the Dual Light Technology, which incorporates 278 patented technologies, are already in production, and will be making their way to Europe and beyond shortly.
Source: XGIMI