Gadget & Tech

Consumer electronics giant Mitsubishi now hopes to combine the inherently large size of a rear-projection unit into a sleeker, lighter-weight product and pack it with enough advanced technology to out-dazzle the rest of the HD pack, although consumers may have to wait a while to see this next-gen version of DLP for themselves.

Since last winter, Mitsubishi has been trickling out details of what it unofficially is calling “Laser TV,” citing it as a breakthrough in existing DLP (digital light processing) that it believes will eventually move HDTV one step further to perfection cosmetically and technologically, through the use of colored lasers.

DLP, a registered trademark of Texas Instruments, traditionally uses white-light mercury bulbs. Mitsubishi’s new system, instead, uses separate red, green and blue semiconductor lasers in combination with an HD chip, which those who have seen a real-world demo (mostly dealers and Mitsubishi employees) say provides richer and more complex colors and hues, and noticeably more distinct HD clarity and depth-of-field.

Mitsubishi contends that lasers also prompt a more realistic manifestation of “black” than current DLP, plasma, LCD or CRT screens. Lasers purportedly shut off totally when not needed, frame-to-frame, creating a more natural blackness. (In contrast, today’s DLP mercury bulbs do not completely blink off, according to Mit-subishi.) Today’s DLP units without colored lasers already produce at least 16 million color variations, including 124,000 shades of gray, according to TI.

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