MORE THAN JUST A BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL
What is it about blue lights? Sure, they’re more soothing to the eye than bright red or green light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and supposedly they’re expensive, which perhaps makes them especially appealing to some. Whatever the reason, it seems like every new consumer electronics device has to have a blue light. Runco has followed the trend by adding a blue-backlit logo on the top of its new digital projectors. Fortunately, the products have numerous other things going for them.
| Housed in a big square black box lies the heart of a high-end projection system. The CL-710 incorporates Texas Instrument’s HD2 version of a 1280:720 resolution DLP chip, which makes the projector HD-capable. |  |
The CL-710 is Runco’s latest digital light processing (DLP) projector. At its heart
is a single, HD2 version of
the digital micromirror de
vice (DMD) from Texas Instruments (TI). A DMD is a microchip with a grid containing hundreds of thousands of microscopic mirrors. This particular grid has 1,280 mirrors horizontally and 720 mirrors vertically, to be exact, which makes this projector compatible with high-
definition signals. A spinning color-filter wheel, which adds color to the image, uses six segments, two each for red, green and blue. The HD2 chip is one of TI’s more advanced DMDs and exhibits substantially improved brightness and darker blacks than did the company’s previous versions. An HD2-plus chip was an
nounced last fall at the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association (CEDIA) convention, but improvements in preliminary products seemed barely noticeable.
