16 December 2010

Osram doubles green LED brightness for 2-meter office projectors

Osram Opto Semiconductors GmbH of Regensburg, Germany says that the prototype of a green LED based on its OSTAR platform is twice as bright as its predecessors and has a luminous surface that is perfectly uniform.

The single-chip LED benefits from the latest chip technology and a green phosphor converter. Initial samples are already available, and the process of finding partners to develop appropriate LED office projectors is already under way. Osram expects the LED to be launched on the market in summer 2011.

Now that RGB LEDs have conquered the market for pico projectors, the next segment in sight is that of office projectors, says Osram Opto. This has been enabled by the enormous increase in brightness of green LEDs. The prototype with a single chip achieves luminous flux of 410lm and emits at a wavelength of 553nm.

Since a greater proportion of green than red or blue is needed in a projector to produce white light, the increase in brightness of the green LED has a significant effect on the overall system brightness. With these LED prototypes it is possible to produce systems that provide the system brightness of 2000lm that is needed for office projectors, reckons Osram Opto. LED projectors will therefore be powerful enough for large diagonals of more than 2m. Such applications have previously only been possible with projectors that use conventional light sources such as high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps.

“Doubling the brightness of the green LED is a giant leap forward and removes the restriction that LEDs are suitable only for small projectors,” says Volker Mertens, director Marketing Industry at Osram Opto. Apart from providing brilliant image reproduction with saturated colors, LEDs enable projectors to be virtually maintenance-free because they have a life of 30,000 hours. By contrast, high-intensity discharge lamps need to be replaced after only about 400 hours. Projectors with LEDs also respond more quickly to on/off switching, and support stepless dimming. They can therefore adapt very easily to ambient light conditions and reduce energy consumption. The color space can be set with a high degree of flexibility thanks to electronic control of the individual colors.

Due to new high-brightness green LEDs, the LED projectors of the future will be able to produce images with diagonals of several meters, reckons Osram Opto. The projected images themselves will appear brighter for the same lumen value than those produced by conventional light sources thanks to the saturated colors of the LEDs used, the firm adds.

Tags: Osram Green LEDs Office projectors

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