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A few years ago, I spoke with Lars Yoder, one of the chief scientists for Texas Instruments' DLP technology development. It was a terrific conversation about technology with a humble, brilliant man, but as a journalist I had to ask why so many of the DLP projectors of the day displayed video so poorly. The answer, biased or not, was that DLP could do a great job with video, but that the projector manufacturers couldn't cut corners on other video components.
That's taken a while to prove, and a new generation of DLP technology doesn't hurt. But at least a few manufacturers are starting to pay attention to video and turning to DLP for video quality. In January, I reviewed NEC's DLP-based video projector for business and home theater, the HT1000. Here I look at Mitsubishi's entry into an emerging class of affordable business video projectors that pay more than lip service to moving images.
The HT1000 was a completely new video projector, but Mitsubishi's XD300U represents a more gradual evolution. It's actually a revision of the older XD200U, one of the first affordable projectors to license Faroudja's DCDi de-interlacing expertise, and the XGA-resolution XD300U continues on the same course. Smaller design steps mean the XD300U still serves data-mode business projection very well, but thankfully, video is not just along for the ride.
DLP technology, of course, has had some great success in video projection and has been - even going back to that conversation with Texas Instruments - the technology of choice for most very high-end digital cinema projectors. Of course, those models all use three Digital Micromirror Devices and eschew the color wheel of micro-portables. Is it that color wheel, blending synchronized flashes of red, green, and blue (and most often clear for brightness), that compromises the quality of motion video in the smallest of today's projectors?
TI's latest-generation DMD, known as Double Data Rate (DDR), moves information twice as fast, giving the micromirror more timely image information to display. Even older micromirrors could move tens of thousands of times per second, but if the device isn't getting data fast enough, all that speed is just...