Thursday, May 20, 2010

Not RGB!




As expected, using technology identical to DLP or DMD, our projectors do not project 3 colours (Red, Green, Blue). Instead they output four channels (in this order: LBRG). L is sort of a Luminance boost to push light-contrast a bit further in these projectors. To test this we made this simple experiment: rapidly move a white "thing" in front of the light beam coming from the projector, and capture this in a photograph with an exposure time long enough to get the various instances frozen in time by the projector's vertical refresh frequency.
Doing this when a bright white color is projected reveals all the base colours the projector is outputting.These two images show what happens when a white peace of paper is flown through the light beam at high speed, when the light being projected is of a dim colour or a bright colour.

If you are curious to try this yourself, the exposure time is mostly only relevant to make sure you catch the object moving in the field of view. These pictures were 1s in duration. To get the colors bright enough you should play with photographic aperture and film/sensor sensitivity. This is obviously true for exposures really longer than the projector's refresh rate, and if you assume a completely black background.

For curiosity, I don't know why the order in which the colors comes out is this particular one. I would place Green and White at the most opposite palces in time. This I would do arguing that our eyes are most sensitive to Green (and "white") than other colors.. So LRGB would be fine for me, as could imagine that the "blinking frequency" (frequency of intensity changes detected by our eyes) would be harder to spot (would appear 2x higher: low-high-low-high vs high-high-low-low).

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