What is DLP you ask? DLP stands for Digital Light Processing, a technology developed by Texas Instruments in 1987, becoming commercially available in 1996.
At the center of this technology is an optical semi-conductor called the Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). It contains a rectangular array of up to 1.3 million hinge-mounted microscopic mirrors; each of these micro mirrors measures less than one-fifth the width of a human hair, and corresponds to one pixel in a projected image.
These mirrors are capable of switching on and off thousands of times per second and are used to direct light towards or away from a dedicated pixel space (one space for each mirror). The amount of light or darkness of the pixel is determined by the length of time a pixel is turned on or off. This part of the DLP technology will only produce various shades of grey from white to black.
To add color, a color wheel is places in the light path. Depending on the expense of the DLP projector purchased, this wheel will contain from 4 to 7 segments of red, blue, and green. It spins from 150 to over 250 times per second. As light passes through a point on the color wheel, the mirrors switch in accordance with the light.When a DMD chip is coordinated with a digital video or graphic signal, a light source, and a projection lens, its mirrors can reflect an all-digital image onto a screen or other surface.
