CEDIA 2009

Projectiondesign will be introducing its Avielo Chroma DLP projector with LED illumination. No price was available at press time. The projector is said to produce a wider and more consistent color gamut with its red, green, and Blue LEDs. While the desirability of a wider gamut is debatable given the standard HD color gamut that most program sources use (a playback gamut that's wider than the source simply distorts the colors), more consistent color is always welcome. And unlike conventional lamp-based projectors, the Avielo Chroma's LEDs are said to produce the same color balance throughout their claimed lifetime of 50,000 hours.

Conventional lamps last 2000 hours at best (though some manufacturers do claim much longer life lamp life, a claim we have not had the opportunity to verify). But they often start to loose significant brightness and color balance at less than 1000 hours, and cost hundreds of dollars to replace. Replace that projection lamp every 1000 hours, at a cost of $400 a pop, and you'll chew up $20,000 worth of lamps over 50,000 hours—though you're unlikely to keep any projector that long. That's 4 hours a night for over 34 years!

LEDs are also more power-efficient than projection lamps and should run cooler, minimizing the need for a noisy fan and reducing the heat that can age internal components. But the one possible downside here is that the Avielo Chroma's claimed light output of 600 lumens is significantly lower than many competitive, lamp-based projectors.

The LED lighting requires no color wheel, and since its sequential lighting in this single chip DLP projector operates at many times the rate of a color wheel, the projector is said to eliminate sequential color artifacts—the ubiquitous DLP rainbows. The brightness of the LEDs can also be varied from full brightness to fully off, resulting in an unmeasurable full-on/full-off (peak) contrast ratio.