Patent ID: 7690796

Claim:
A system comprising: first and second liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) display panels each comprising a micro dichroic filter array, each micro dichroic filter array including multiple elements configured to transmit a portion of an incident light beam, the transmitted portion being a filtered portion where the filtered portion from different elements are different colors, and each element being further configured to reflect a portion of the incident light beam, the reflected portion being an unfiltered portion of the light beam, so that the polarization of the unfiltered portion is not changed when leaving the display panel, wherein each display panel is configured to reflect and modulate filtered portions from the corresponding micro dichroic filter array within the display panel so that the polarization of at least some of the filtered portions is changed when leaving the display panel; and a polarizing beam splitter assembly configured so that during operation the polarizing beam splitter assembly combines the filtered portions of a first light beam reflected by the first display panel with filtered portions of a second light beam reflected by the second display panel to form an image beam, and the combined filtered portions of the first and second light beams have mutually orthogonal polarization states.