Color wheel DLP

We all have heard that a projector DLP technology uses an animated color wheel to create colors in the picture … and that is the reality.

Where there is a confusion in the minds of most is what exactly happens with the rotational speed of the color wheel and color regions (segment)

We’ve all heard at times for color wheels with speed of rotation 2 x, 3 x, 4 x, etc. or color wheels with 3 segment, segment, segment 4, 6, etc.

What exactly do these features few yet know. Let’s do an analysis in a simple way that I believe will be understood by all.

The first color wheels had three parts (three-segment), the familiar RGB colors, blue, green and red. Also roamed with speed 60 revolutions per second (3600rpm) named speed 1;.

This figure meant that every second in our picture fall color blue 60 times, the color green 60 times and respectively the red color more than 60 times. This frequency can be defined as a chromatic frequency 60 Hz.

The white part on the color wheel was added by manufacturers in their effort to improve the brightness of the projector and the clarity of the image. The above i.e. wheel 4 wheel segment considered.

Then and then complains about viewing rainbow companies have improved the speed of the color wheel. For the accuracy of their speed doubled from 60 revolutions per second to 120 (7200rpm). So we spent in 120Hz. The so-called 2 x speed.

The difference nowadays, however, came to make the growth of segments and no rotation.

So manufacturers in their effort to make yet more unseen rainbow phenomenon essentially doubled the areas of three primary colors. So he created the 6 segments color wheels (or 7 segment by adding white)

The 6 segments color wheels have 2 blue areas, two green and two red.

This technique essentially doubled the frequency of display colors in 240 times a second, while rotating the color wheel remained at 120 revolutions per second (7200rpm-120Hz).

This color wheel is known as a wheel with 4 x speed.

Therefore, the difference of a color wheel with speed 2 x with a 4 x is not the speed of rotation the other color areas are twice in the second.

I hope this short article was quite informative and led to understand concepts like speed and parts of a color wheel.

1 Comment

  1. Carl andren says:

    When replacing my Optima ep728 projector’s DLP chip, I noticed that the color wheel was slightly tilted from vertical. Is this normal or did I do that during reassembly? If it is normal, I can imagine that it might be to avoid spurious reflections.

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