Color Wheel
A color wheel is a round and disc shaped wheel which is used in projectors to display colored images. It uses the RGB color pattern and rotates to produce a new color or shade according to the color which is to be displayed.
A color wheel is used in DLP ( Digital Light Processing ) technology projectors which are currently the most used projectors, nearly 85% of cinemas around the world make use of DLP projectors used in about 85% of the world’s cinemas. A color wheel in a DLP cinema projector has a high color accuracy of producing almost 35 trillion different colors with no motion blur at all. A color wheel of DLP projector has a lifespan of about 20000 hours.
Problems of using color wheel:
- The major drawback of using a color wheel is known as the “Rainbow effect” in which most people see the image in continuous flow while some people’s brain actually see the colors being displayed separately or being distorted.
- If the wheel is slightly broken, it will produce a lot of noise as it will not be balanced on its fixed position. Furthermore the colors would awful
- Over time, dust will start building up inside the projector, which, if not cleaned can cause the projector to stop working properly
A DLP projector uses a traditional lamp as it’s light source which is not very bright as compared to LED-DLP projectors which use LED lights as their light source. and also there is no Rainbow effect too.
Alternative to color wheel
You can use a DLP projector with three chips, one for each RGB color. These projectors have brilliant image quality but unfortunately are more expensive when compared to color wheel projectors