Color Wheel! Next I expect they'll run on coal.

Ever had or known anyone else that had one of those post-modern aluminum Christmas trees with the rotating color wheel spotlight behind it?
It would seem that someone at Samsung Electronics did, and what a difference in price and reliability it has made in their DLP televisions......sadly, both being proportionally lower.

"What?", You ask.

Here's the lowdown...

DLP chips (a miracle of technology in themselves) can only produce a picture in shades of grey. Yup, black and white. So the original way to get a color picture using DLP technology was to use three of them, each with its own color filter - red, blue and green -, then combine the three images to make one beautiful picture using mirrors or prisms.

But that was too expensive to compete with the old style of Projection TV's that used 3 picture tubes (C.R.T.s) - believe it or not.

So Samsung got an idea.... Why not just use one chip for all three by alternating filters of each color in the light stream? Just flash the one-color images so fast on the screen that it fools the brain into thinking it sees one full-color picture?

And thus the color-wheel was reborn.

Problem? In order to create the required 30 full-color frames a second that modern TV shows us, the wheel has to rotate at 1800 rpm in close proximity to the very hot (and equally short-lived) light source. The bearings and the motor fail......first it whirrs loudly (some have even been known to drown out their own audio) for a time then the picture either disappears or goes to only one color.

Thanks Samsung, now that you've found a way to put moving parts in a High Definition DLP TV I might just stand a chance of sticking with this career!