The history of projection technology is, in many ways, a history of trade-offs. Greater brightness often meant larger systems. Wider color gamut came at the expense of cost or gradation. For decades, manufacturers have optimized individual components in isolation, repeatedly encountering the same limits.
Visual compromises can pull audiences out of the experience, diminishing the sense of immersion that today’s environments demand. The pressure is on for projection technology to deliver the engaging, high-quality immersive experiences audiences crave.
Projection tech has always evolved, but the latest advancements mark a distinction in the industry’s ability to create truly vivid, lifelike, and colorful activations. Let’s explore how VIVID PRIME, a new approach to RGB laser light source technology, uniquely solves this challenge.
A System-Level Approach
One of the tradeoffs to the ease and cost-effectiveness of 1-DLP projection is the "rainbow effect," brief flashes of spectral color at the edges of bright objects, most visible when the eye scans across a high-contrast scene like white subtitles against a black background. This occurs because a single DMD chip can only display one color at a time. Therefore, it cycles through red, green, and blue subframes at high speed.
Under typical viewing conditions, the eye blends these into a full-color image, but certain viewing scenarios can make the individual subframes more noticeable. As a result, audiences may notice distracting flashes of color during fast eye movement, particularly in dark or high-contrast environments.
Solving for the rainbow effect requires more than a collection of features. It demands a unified engineering approach that emerges from the same integrated system design.
The intuitive solution is to increase subframe speed, since shorter color segments reduce visual separation during eye movement. However, higher switching speeds can introduce gradation loss and visible dither noise patterns, creating a different kind of artifact. Solving the rainbow effect without introducing these secondary issues requires precise coordination between the light source and DMD sequencing.
Seeing the negative impact the rainbow effect has on both the audience and operator experience, we chose to solve for this challenge with our new VIVID PRIME technology. Rather than advancing individual components independently, it takes a system-level approach, integrating the optical design, light source architecture, and DMD drive circuitry into a unified system.
The result is a projection technology that resolves long-standing conflicts between image quality parameters—not by managing trade-offs more efficiently, but by engineering around them at a system level. Its light source architecture delivers color switching speeds more than five times faster than conventional systems, dramatically increasing the subframe rate.
At the same time, a proprietary DMD sequencing approach, developed in collaboration with Texas Instruments (TI), helps preserve gradation and minimize visual anomalies at these higher speeds. By aligning these elements, VIVID PRIME reduces the visibility of the rainbow effect while maintaining overall image fidelity.
Fortunately, the same architecture that minimizes the rainbow effect also addresses a set of technical challenges that have long constrained what projection, even pure RGB, can deliver in demanding environments. This includes camera color shift, speckle noise, and the inherent tension between wide color gamut and smooth gradation reproduction. A comprehensive projection system where each element contributes to performance allows improvements to build on one another within a unified design.
An Impact on Experiences
This level of coordinated performance is particularly valuable in applications where multiple image quality factors come into play simultaneously, settings where no single compromise is acceptable and where image performance is highly visible.
Museums and cultural institutions: Exhibition environments increasingly rely on projection for both interpretive display and artistic installation. Galleries and museums need advanced projection tech to achieve accurate, stable color reproduction as well as artifact-free imagery at extended viewing distances.
Themed entertainment and immersive environments: Projection mapping and immersive installations place intense demands on image consistency, often requiring multiple projectors to operate for long periods and at close viewing distances. In these settings, even minor visual inconsistencies can break immersion. High-performance projectors with a compact form factor support easier integration in these constrained spaces.
Corporate and large-venue presentation: In a single day, a large-venue system might shift from a product launch video to a dark-room executive presentation. Each demands a slightly different visual priority. Rather than forcing trade-offs between these modes, RGB laser light source technology helps maintain consistency across them, so content changes feel intentional.
Simulation and visualization: In simulation environments, projection quality shapes decision-making. A military defense member in a simulated training environment relies on subtle visual cues as scenes evolve while projection reliability determines someone’s next swing in a golf simulator. Speckle suppression and gradation fidelity speak directly to these needs.
Broadcast and live production: On a concert stage, projection is often doing double duty—enhancing the in-person experience while also becoming part of the televised frame. What looks vibrant in the room still must translate through a camera sensor and broadcast feed.
Solving for the rainbow effect requires more than a collection of features. It demands a unified engineering approach that emerges from the same integrated system design.
For integrators and end users evaluating projection technology for demanding applications, the development of RGB laser light-source technology represents a meaningful step forward in designing and delivering projection performance.
