The projectors owe their small scale to more diminutive lamp and electronics technology, as well as to a smaller micromirror chip from Texas Instruments Inc. in Dallas. This is because the micromirrors are very large relative to the gap between them, while elements in LCD projectors are generally much smaller compared with the distance between them. Besides providing XGA resolution, micromirrors helped one projector manufacturer to produce a portable unit that weighs less than 3 lb. Texas Instruments Inc. The chip in the current projectors is 0.7 in. in diameter. The smaller chip doesn't sacrifice performance, Waite said, adding that the U3 series carry XGA resolution, a difference that is apparent in the display space.
XGA resolution displays about a third more information than SVGA projectors.
Texas Instruments' micromirrors are combined with control and formatting electronics to form the company's Digital Light Processing technology. Light in the projector travels from a source through a rapidly moving color wheel and strikes the device's 500,000 micromirrors. The mirrors modulate the light to create a digital image, which is enlarged and projected by a wide-angle throw lens. Micromirror technology, however, delivers images using a single panel. And, because micromirrors are a reflective technology, they typically extract more lumens of output brightness per watt of lamp input than LCD technology, which requires half of the source light to be polarized.