Watching movies with friends under the stars is the most exhilarating thing to do on weekend nights. Assume yourself with your friends in a gathering under the sky in your patio or backyard holding some yummy snacks and watching your favorite movie. What else can you ask for?
Outdoor projectors do need external speakers for better sound and to make you feel like watching a movie in a drive-in cinema. You can buy the best speakers for outdoor projector to make your movie nights even more exciting.
But what if this movie night gets spoiled if the projector gets out of order or if it does not even start or work properly? Have you ever wondered how an outdoor projector works? Understanding its mechanism is very important if you own an outdoor projector or if you are planning to buy one.
There are two types of projectors
DLP Projectors: DLP stands for Digital Light Processing.
LCD Projectors: LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display
Mechanism of a Projector
The functioning of an outdoor projector is the same as the projectors you are having in conference rooms or schools or colleges. They work pretty much the same way. Basically it is the motherboard which does all the magic and basic functions starting here. Projectors have built-in speakers.
Some projectors have Bluetooth and Wifi connections. For better sound external speakers can be connected for better sound.
Under the control board, there is a battery and in the middle there is a cooling fan and the speakers which have an amplifier inside too. Now the cooling fan in the middle is of crucial importance as the control board gets very hot during the functioning of the projector and it needs to get cooled throughout the working procedure.
The light unit or RGB is also a main component of the projector. There are three sets of wires having three primary colors which are Red, Green and Blue. These sets of wires are for the RGB light inside. The technology of the projector depends on the LED and there are three separate LEDs for red, green and blue lights. The projection of the images on the screen is a bit more complicated than it seems to be and this is explained as under.
To control each picture frame there is a DLP chip for the Digital Light Process. Here we do have some regulators, battery rechargers and balancing other important microprocessors and other HDMI input and so on.
Functioning of DLP Projectors
It starts with a powerful light source. This light is usually an incandescent lamp. This light source needs a lot of power to display the light out of the projector. The light passes through different lenses and then filters out. The filter divides the right color from the light and only allows the red, blue and green colors to pass through the filter. These colors are passed to RGB. These three basic colors are merged to develop other different colors from the spectrum.
There are two methods of filtering out the right color for the picture.
- Rotating Filter
This filter is on the disc which has red, green and blue portions on the spinning disc. It rotates and filters out red, green and blue colors so fast so that your naked eye does not see the change between the colors.
- Ball of Three
It is the second method of dividing the colors. In this method special optics are used that reflect special colors. In this way it only reflects special colors to pass through. Here we have only red, green and blue colors. The colors are later merged using the prisms to create a picture on the screen.
After color separation the second step is to create the image on the screen. Any RGB image can be separated in red, green and blue colors. To create the images, the DLP projector uses microscopic mirrors. These mirrors have pixels.
In the rotating disc, the pixels for the red image are separated. Similar is done in the case of green and blue images. Human eye is unable to see these separations because this process is so fast. As a result, you only see the blend of these colors. The DLP chip inside the control board is responsible for microscopic mirrors. The rotating chip gives the feedback to the DLP chip and it is decided which color should be highlighted. If there are more mirrors, there will be higher resolution of the image produced on the screen.
Then there is a focusing lens on the final step. This enables them to focus the image better at a greater distance.
Functioning of LED Projectors
There is a powerful light source in LCD projectors too at the first step which divides the colors just like DLP projectors. But here instead of micro mirrors, LCDs are used. The colors of the pixels are polarized using an LCD Mask. There is a different mask for each color and when the frames are merged together you can see the original image or picture.
A better solution is the usage of a three-way system by using three different LCDs. Each LCD displays images for red, green and blue channels separately. The images are merged together by using prisms and this is how the picture is seen on the screen. The image is passed through the focusing lens to focus the high resolution image on the screen.
An LCD projector does not use only one light source instead it uses three different light sources. By this technology there is no need to filter red, green and blue colors separately because already the display of three colors are done separately. These light sources get extremely hot due to the continuous working. So a cooling fan is used to keep them at normal temperature in order to keep on working.
Conclusion
As the mechanism of the projector and functioning of DLP and LCD projectors have been discussed separately in this article, I anticipate that you would now be able to understand the way how outdoor projector work?
As you have obtained all the knowledge, you can assess the problems related to your projector and can try to fix them too or at least know from where the fault arises.
A projector is more affordable than a large TV setup. By this you can have more fun using less effort.
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