OLED-TV|Laser-TV|SED|Display|FED|

A very good article from the New York times about rear projection with Laser and LED light bulbs.

HIGH-DEFINITION television sets grow ever more sophisticated, but the colors on many of the screens are still created the old-time way: with tubes or bulbs that give off white light that is filtered into primary colors and remixed.

Now, several manufacturers are replacing these bulbs with lasers and light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s. These lasers and L.E.D.’s do not beam white light, but rather its three basic building blocks: red, green and blue. Beams are emitted in a narrow band of wavelengths very close to those of single, pure colors, giving off the brilliant, saturated red of a blazing sunset or the shimmering, luminous blue of a rainbow.
Lasers promise an even wider range of colors than L.E.D.’s, Mr. Chinnock said. “The lasers produce extremely saturated colors — the red is very red.” In contrast, he said, the red in many displays has a lot of orange in it. Because of that limitation, it is harder to show the range of shades that the eye can see, for example, between red and orange.

LASER light may also help rear-projection sets become thinner. “You can create some different architectures in how the light is folded and managed inside the TV,” Mr. Chinnock said, “so that you could potentially get a rear-projection laser TV that’s 6 to 8 inches deep.”

One of the lasers widely demonstrated at trade shows is made by Novalux, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “The lasers will be able to give more than 90 percent of the color range that our eyes can see,” said Jean-Michel Pelaprat, chief executive of Novalux. “That’s not available from plasma displays and L.C.D.’s, whose color gamut reaches only 40 percent and 35 percent, respectively.”

L.C.D. televisions, too, may soon be affected by the new light sources, Mr. Chinnock of Insight Media said. The next step may be to eliminate the cold cathode fluorescent lamps that illuminate the sets from the back.

“The idea is to replace these lamps with a laser or L.E.D. light source in the back, and get much better color saturation,” he said.

neytimes