Over the past decades, projector light source technology has incredibly evolved, from traditional incandescent lamps to LEDs to modern laser technology. And while there has been a lot of hype around this technology, many people have yet to fully understand how it works and its efficiency.
So, whether you’re looking for information on the basics and technicalities before making that purchase or you’re just generally curious, best believe you’ll find everything here. This article discusses this modern projector based on laser light sources and their strengths and weaknesses.
What is a Laser Projector?
Projectors without lamp light sources are becoming more prevalent on the market. They are known as solid-state light sources, SSL, or laser projectors. So, what does it mean? How is it amazingly distinct from the lamp and LED projectors? Well, laser projectors are projectors with light-producing systems made up of laser diodes—with red, green, and blue colors or also called RGB projection.
Compared to lamp-based systems, the light produced by SSL systems has a longer, more steady glow, and dims over time at a far slower rate. As a result, this technology offers outstanding image quality and a significantly longer lifespan than conventional lamp projectors. LED light source was the first adaptation of the SSL system. However, it had its limitation —less brightness capacity. Besides these, the laser light source has much more benefits which will be discussed later in this article.
Before Laser light source…
Before we go down to the technicalities of how the laser projector works, it’s important to understand how the conventional lamp system and LED work and how they’re different from the laser technology.
The traditional or normal projector basically uses an incandescent lamp (bulb) to project a lot of white light which is then filtered through a rotating disk to produce the primary colors—red, green, and blue. These filtered primary colors are then reflected off a chip, either the DLP or LCD chip, merging them to produce the spectrums for our images.
After conventional lamps, came LED technology. One of the weaknesses of the lamp-based source was its light incoherence. They lose between 20% to 50% of the light generated due to the lack of direction in the light source —a loss that becomes light pollution in the environment. LEDs overcame this problem by having a directional light source, although incoherent, more precise than a lamp. With its less brightness capacity, the LED system is still slightly inefficient.
How does a Laser Projector work, then?
On the other hand, a laser projector uses laser light sources —three primary-color laser or RGB laser light sources. An entire upgrade technology! While the light source needs to illuminate a panel which in turn produces the image in lamp-based projectors, laser projectors use lasers to generate the light. The light produced from the RGB lasers is then deflected off a chip coherently, amplified, and directed by the mirror and lenses to project the images on your screen.
Unlike the normal lamp projector that uses just one-third of the white light produced due to the lack of direction, the RGB laser technology produces as much as is necessary to project an image.
How long does a Laser Projector last?
The information shared so far has been pretty interesting and you may probably be asking now, “How long does a laser projector last?”. “What’s the actual lifespan?”. “What’s its maintenance like?”.
Well, it’s worth noting here that when we’re referring to a laser projector’s lifespan, we actually mean the projector’s lifespan. That is to say, in contrast to ordinary projector lamp bulbs, lasers in a laser projector are not made to be changed. Generally, a laser projector has a 20,000-hours lifespan. That is the equivalent of 6.8 years of nonstop 8-hour days. Although they can’t be changed like the lamp projector, it has proven to be more efficient and consume much less energy.
How much does a Laser Projector cost?
As you can see, laser projectors are the future and the present because they are even more efficient than LED technology, and of course more than traditional lamps; but we must warn you, the price can laser through your ‘bank account and pocket’. The technology is currently the best, and therefore the most expensive. You can go without a problem to $4,000, and the cheapest laser projectors range from $500 to $1,000.
Benefits of Laser Light Source Technology
The use of a laser lighting source provides a set of well-documented benefits that it is very good for us to know, especially if we have in mind to buy a laser projector for our installation in the short or medium term. Let’s get down to it.
Wrapping Up
By now, you need no expert on the latest projector technology to tell you that laser projectors are objectively way better —color accuracy, better brightness uniformity, and less brightness decay over the life of the projector compared to others.
