The coolest things in entertainment have always been, and will always be, lasers. That’s right, frickin’ lasers. At their height, sometime in the Pink Floyd era, lasers shot out over the auditorium and pierced the acrid pyro smoke like some alien fan pulsing in ridiculously fast waves, only in the next song to become shooting rods of intensely colored beams of acid gloriousness. I love lasers. I always have. You love them too.
Cool Beams
At one time, they powered the first CD you ever listened to, and if I’m correct, it sounded crazy good right? Then they powered the machines that allowed you to watch all the movies you wanted in glorious 480i at home and abroad on DVD. And even though it seemed like a high definition dream, those lowly standard-def discs gave rise to one of the most heated format battles in consumer electronics. It helped that around the same time, distant cousins to laser, LED, LCD, and plasma, started to revolutionize the way we viewed anything.
When Blu-ray came out on top over HD-DVD, your gaming systems (hell, the gaming console in your living room right now) had even more accurate laser systems in them and hi def had really come home. They made all that really awesome smart-bombs-flying-through-windows footage from Desert Storm possible. They allowed people to see. They cut through steel. They shot down ICBM’s. They removed that crappy tattoo you got on your first tour. The lowly laser sat there at the head-end of it all, just shooting away and minding its own business. That’s all changing right now, though. In projection systems, lasers are being heralded with a sort of Second Coming status over traditional light sources. Yeah, yeah…LED’s are the beautiful stepchild right now. But those little diodes don’t have nearly the raw strength or potential or sheer panache that the granddaddy of all light has.
I recently went to a lecture and was reminded about the reason why lasers are so wonderful in the first place. Albert Einstein’s 1917 paper on the possibility of stimulated emission laid the theoretical groundwork for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and it wasn’t until 40 years later that physicists actually came up with a use for it. Fast forward another 50 years, and we get the groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves, minute deflections in the space-time continuum caused by converging black holes 1.5 billion years ago. Einstein predicted these existed, but no one had any way to sense them. Their existence was proven with 99.99994% accuracy on Sept. 14, 2015 by — you guessed it — frickin’ lasers.
From Movies to Live Events
All this is fascinating, but what does it mean to our industry? The coming revolution is in cinema right now, but it’s coming to a concert and eventually a boardroom near you in the not-so-distant future. The debate right now in projection is over lamp-based illumination or laser illumination. In the dim past of 2006, digital conversion of film in the cinema market had reached almost complete saturation. This means nearly every theater was a digital house that required projectors of a certain caliber and technology. Mainly for DCI compliance. DCI stands for Digital Cinema Initiatives, and it’s the governing voice over the accuracy of technical specs for projection systems in cinema. It’s waaay more
exacting than the requirements for say, a boardroom or a concert tour. But as cinema goes, so goes the industry. The vast majority of the cinema projectors up until now have been Xenon-lamp based. The reason being, Xenon lamps can more accurately and consistently deliver the P3 color standard. And you can also make Xenon lamps really, really, bright. The ceiling so far has topped out around 35K lumens. One of the problems, however is that these lamps also produce other wavelengths of light that aren’t so desirable — mainly yellow (with some IR and UV thrown in for good measure). So you have to add filters in the optic chain to cut these wavelengths which cuts down brightness. And increases heat — a lot. And ultimately degrades lamp life. The other bummer about lamps this size and power is expense. And danger. I just re-lamped two older DLP projectors to the tune of $6,500 because the parts are simply that rare and dangerous. Welding gloves and a blast mask are de rigueur for this type of work (and almost as exciting as a Super Trouper lamp!) So now you have an entire industry gobbling up lamps (something like 100,000 screens worldwide), and the math gets ugly for operators. Lasers to the rescue!
There are currently two main laser technologies in use today — Laser Phosphor and its much-more-sophisticated-and-expensive cousin, True RGB Laser. The beauty and main advantages of both are that there are no more “lamps,” per se. There are other big advantages, but let’s look at a few of the differences first. Laser Phosphor, or LP, uses blue laser diodes (and sometimes red) with a yellow phosphor wheel. When the blue light shoots through the wheel, the yellow phosphor is excited and the end result is white (ish) light. Then we pass it through a color wheel to extract more frequencies and viola, a video picture. RGB Laser systems use Red, Green, and Blue laser diodes to produce a more pure and accurate color model. Before I draw the ire of all the purists out there, different manufacturers have vastly different specs for their product portfolios, and yes, there are design differences that relate to which market you use these co-existing technologies in. But in general, both are great for 24/7 operation.
RGB tends to be on the brighter end of the spectrum, with capabilities up to and now beyond 60K lumens, with a life of 30,000 hours running at 80 percent. LP is generally lower in lumen output — typically around 15-20K lumens — with a life of 30,000 running at 50 percent. The RGB models are particularly good for 3D, as the uniformity of extreme brightness is key for those folks. The xenon lamps I just replaced are good for 750 hours. So, for a total cost of ownership, the math starts to look pretty tempting when you are talking about most of the projector fleet approaching 10-12 years old.
Rental houses and concert touring markets are going to be slow to jump on the bandwagon, simply because of initial cost. And in reality, there are a whole bunch of relatively inexpensive models on the market as we speak. But it’s kind of like buying the initial model-year of a convertible sports car. It’s generally not a good idea until they work out the kinks.
But like everything, the price will come down, the quality will go up, and we’ll all be laser jockeys real soon. If you’re an operator or technician, start reading up on the safety spec that goes along with these beasts. They exist. But they’re not nearly as fun and exciting as installing a lamp wearing welding gloves and a blast mask.
Check out Jeff Gooch’s blog at www.projectionfreak.com.
