What is a 3LCD projector?

LCD Basics
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) projectors pass light through LCD panels about the size of a postage stamp; the LCD panel is made up of miniscule panels ('pixels') that can be clear, opaque or some semi-clear point in between. These pixels take the form of the image to be created, and the light passes through the clear or partly-clear areas in the same way that light passes through the clear or gray parts of a negative.

The projector's lens, in turn, expands the image and directs the light onto the screen or viewing surface. This enlarges all the tiny details and creates clear, detailed and beautiful images with ultra-smooth movement.

Epson's 3-panel LCD System
A projector with the Epson-designed 3-panel Liquid Crystal Display ('3LCD') system uses dichroic mirrors to break the white light from the lamp into red, green and blue light. Each of the three colors of light is then passed through its own LCD panel and then recombined by a prism before being projected onto the screen. The result is smooth-moving images with rich, full color, since all three basic colors are included in each pixel of the projected image at all times.

The Technology Behind the Internal Prism



The Technology Behind Other Projectors
After the 3LCD projector system, the second most common type of business projector is the 1-chip DLP™* projector system. These 1-chip DLP™ projectors create pulses of colored light by shining lamplight through red, green, blue and white*** parts of a rotating wheel.

These rapid pulses - thousands per second - are then reflected by a DMD™** device. The DMD™ device has one tiny mirror for each pixel in the image. It is on a hinge, and flickers rapidly. The series of rapid color bursts are then projected on the screen and seen in rapid succession. The viewer's brain can't pick out the individual flickers, but instead mixes the basic colors that appear one after the other in each pixel to come up with the final color the viewer sees.

*DLP™ (Digital Light Processing™) is a trademark of Texas Instruments Incorporated. **DMD™ (Digital Micromirror Device™) is a trademark of Texas Instruments Incorporated. ***Some 1-chip DLP™ projectors do not contain white but contain other colors.