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Hitachi is currently the only projectormaker selling and shipping HLD based LED projectors,and it has been since last summer. Last year Hitachi demonstrated a more or less market ready projector at ISE, for availability in June and it was the only one not to post-pone or even cancel its HLD projector launch. The 3500 lumens! yes somehow Hitachi manages to get more (white) light out of its WUXGA and WXGA DLP projectors than the 2500 of Philips reference design. These sell for around $4500, so they are premium projectors geared towards higher education. But they provide for easy installation as they remain cool and exhaust air is never above 70 degrees Celcius. So they made a return to ISE this year.
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What are the advantages of HLD does it allow better performance for less money. How is contrast compared to LCD,Lcos,DLP. Is it lamp based or laser. Thank you. -
HLD, or High Density Lumens LED, is the Philips Lighting technology to combine light from multiple blue LEDs into a 'ceramic' rod that converts blue into green. The light exits from the front of the rod to match the aperture of the imager, in this case an 0.67" WUXGA DLP chip. The aperture/surface area of a powerful LED is always too large for a small DLP or LCD chip, so you either use this combining/converting rod or are limited in light output, when using LEDs for projection.
The Blue LEDs and HLD rod are complimented by a Blue and a Red LED from OSRAM to provide RGB light source.
LED has advantage in powerusage and the associated heatdissipation. Plus instant on-off cycling and 20K hours of low maintenance usage.
Philips pushed this technology at ISE 2016 and Infocomm 2015 before that. Hitachi and Optoma were the launch customers announced at Infocomm, demonstrating prototypes. Optoma has removed it from its Roadmap. Hitachi is actually selling these projectors. And BenQ is about to launch HLD in the Coretronic (Optoma's parent company) 4K platform in the X12000. Unfortuantely it has not only benefits like saturated reds and perceived contrast. As it has a red push and red clouds and green dots in dark areas. The first two issues existed in Optoma provided prototypes last year. So is this due to Coretronic projector design or Philips light source?
Hitachi tends to demo them using green content, so no way to judge from its implementation.
So this promising light source seems to have not really caught on. What will Philips being one of the big two/three projector lamp makers do when Solid State overtakes UHP/Xenon lamps, and the extension on mercury ban in RoHs does not get renewed?
Coretronic focussed on adding red laser diodes to the regular blue diodes, instead. This way Red and Green no longer have to be derived from blue laser light combined with yellow phosphor and a filter. Green can be derived from blue light with green phosphor, yellow from yellow phosphor and the red directky from red lasers, assisted by a red filter.
So promising technology does not always make it in the maket place, but there are still two vendors that provide cool running, therefore relatively quiet, solid state projectors using HLD. This provides an update to last year's news.
Philips had plans for a second generation using a second red rod, to boast all light levels. 5000 lumens white light and 2500 lumens sRGB/Rec. 709. That would have made LED an interesting lamp replacement in HT.Comment
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Epson showed a little portable blue laser-phosphor projector, one had run 5000 hours the other was new they looked the same. Another solid state lightsource advantage.Comment
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