Quote:
Originally Posted by Phototone
DLP is certainly not obsolete technology, although its use in rear screen sets is now made obsolete by Flat Screen tv's. DLP is as current as any technology for video projection. I can understand that a high-end rear projection DLP could deliver as good a picture as many LCD.
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DLP may not be obsolete (today's motion-picture theaters use this technology instead of old 8- and 16-mm projectors), but miniman82's and my point is that projection televisions using cathode-ray tubes
are indeed obsolete, much as the NTSC television standard was rendered obsolete by the ATSC one in 2009.
Advances in technology since the early 1980s may well have resulted in DLP sets that can deliver pictures as good as today's LCD sets, but the size of most DLP TVs may be keeping them out of American living rooms, not to mention the short life of the projection lamp. I don't know whether today's DLPs still use arc lamps, but if they do, set owners still must replace that lamp every so often, depending on how much the set is used (often at considerable expense; I understand these lamps sell for something like $100 apiece if not more). It may very well be that today's DLP TVs use high-power LEDs as backlight sources, which all but eliminates the chance of a bulb burning out; most LEDs can last hundreds or thousands of hours to half brightness, not unlike LCD television screens. The latter are often rated for 60,000 hours, which works out to 20 years or more of average use. Too bad the electronics in LCD flat screens, more often than not, fail after only four or five years,
while the panel still has plenty of life left in it.