Bobwang
Member
ProjectorCentral has a good breakdown of what Texas Instruments is doing to the actual mirrors, and it is more interesting than the usual chip refresh. The line most of us have seen already is the High Efficiency Pixel design in XGIMI's Titan, a 0.78-inch device with 9-micron mirrors doing native 1080p and four-way shifting up to UHD. The claimed gain there comes from a 14.5 degree mirror swing and thinner gaps between mirrors, which is a polite way of saying less of the lamp output gets thrown away between pixels.
The new parts are the ones I want to see in a shipping product. The 0.47-inch DLP473TE drops to 5.4-micron mirrors and is pitched at high-output work, topping out around 8,000 lumens. The 0.39-inch DLP390TP goes down to 4.5 microns but can't shed as much heat, so TI puts it at 1,800 to 2,700 lumens depending on whether you feed it RGB laser or laser-phosphor. That second one is the consumer story: a smaller, lighter chassis without the usual brightness cliff.
The thing nobody talks about is buried at the end. TI says the controller, not the mirror, is currently the bottleneck, and the new ones open the door to 4K at 120Hz instead of 60 and single-digit latency. Every 0.47-inch home projector I have used caps out at 4K60, and if that ceiling moves it changes the console conversation entirely.
How long do we usually wait between a TI chip announcement and a projector you can actually buy with it? My rough sense is 18 months, but I would like someone with a longer memory to correct me.
The new parts are the ones I want to see in a shipping product. The 0.47-inch DLP473TE drops to 5.4-micron mirrors and is pitched at high-output work, topping out around 8,000 lumens. The 0.39-inch DLP390TP goes down to 4.5 microns but can't shed as much heat, so TI puts it at 1,800 to 2,700 lumens depending on whether you feed it RGB laser or laser-phosphor. That second one is the consumer story: a smaller, lighter chassis without the usual brightness cliff.
The thing nobody talks about is buried at the end. TI says the controller, not the mirror, is currently the bottleneck, and the new ones open the door to 4K at 120Hz instead of 60 and single-digit latency. Every 0.47-inch home projector I have used caps out at 4K60, and if that ceiling moves it changes the console conversation entirely.
How long do we usually wait between a TI chip announcement and a projector you can actually buy with it? My rough sense is 18 months, but I would like someone with a longer memory to correct me.
