Audio Visual: Here comes D-ILA technology
Gatot Susetyo, Contributor, Jakarta
Have you ever seen your favorite film heroes like James Bond on a big screen in your home, or experienced life size video gaming? That's what a portable projector can do for you.
A projector, even the portable ones, are able to deliver big screen entertainment in your home.
As we know there are four main criteria when buying a projector; their brightness, weight, resolution and, of course, budget.
ScreenPlay 110 InFocus is an example of a fairly small one, so it can be easily stored when not in use and can be moved from room to room. Imagine if you tried that with a 300 kilogram rear projection TV!.
Nowadays, many portable projectors offer better performance than the rear projection large screen TVs. The image size can be scaled up to a movie theater experience. They can also display DVD or VHS movies, as well as computer images, digital video or photos with equal ease.
If you visit Music Image, a home theater boutique located on the third floor of Taman Anggrek Mall in West Jakarta, you will find a portable home theater projector, Vivid Red made by Christie Digital. It offers an SXGA+(1365 x 1024 line) resolution and 1300 ANSI lumens of light output with a contrast ratio of 500:1. As we know, SXGA/UXGA is used for very high resolution applications, typically CAD CAM and highly detailed pictures, whereas lumens are the brightness measurement of a projector.
The greater the value, the more powerful the projector and the less the projector will be affected by ambient light. How much brightness a portable projector needs will depend greatly upon its use and where the projector is to be used.
The most unique thing about the Vivid Red is that it utilizes D-ILA LCD panel technology. This is the newest home theater portable projector technology sold in Indonesia.
According to Ongky, the owner of the Music Image, there are two advantages of D-ILA. First, it has a large amount of pixels. Secondly, it has a better "fill factor" than LCD, DLP or CRT projectors.
According to JVC which first manufactured D-ILA, D-ILA used to provide the optimum combination of projector brightness, contrast and resolution performance.
Resolution refers to the density of pixels (DPI 'dots per square inch') on the screen. The greater number of pixels the image is made up from, the clearer the image will become.
Combined with brightness, the resolution of your projector will determine its performance. What about fill factor? Fill Factor, also known as "aperture ratio" is the ratio between the area of a pixels that can actually be illuminated divided by the space that the pixel occupies. In other words, it is a measurement of how much of the pixel is actually "lit" and how much is "wasted". An LCD fill factor runs from 40 percent to 60 percent. DLP's fill factor gets to about 85 percent. CRT projectors have a fill factor of 100 percent. D-ILA? It has a fill factor of 93 percent.
If LCD projection systems are based on transmissive LCDs using horizontal liquid-crystal alignment, the D-ILA, in contrast, is a reflective projector using an active-matrix LCD with a vertical LC alignment. In principle, reflective-LCD projectors have the ability to offer images at much-higher brightness and higher resolution.
D-ILA no longer needs CRTs for RGB input, relay lenses or an optoelectric transfer process. This is because the D-ILA system writes an image directly to the newly developed liquid-crystal device.
The device sells for about US$11,000 in Indonesia. It may be quite expensive, but this technology is likely to dominate the home theater projector market in the future. With fewer components, processes and required adjustments, the D-ILA devices are easier to incorporate into a projector system. Moreover, the overall projector becomes much more compact, and is easier to carry around and set up for home cinema.