EEVblog 1546 - INSANE $30k 4K Panoramic DLP Projector TEARDOWN 

I love this video so much. I run a planetarium and we have 8 of these projectors in our planetarium dome and have been certified for maintenance on these things for a long time. They are such amazing workhorse projectors that last a VERY long time. The over-engineering on these make them last for almost a decade of use if properly maintained. The only big issue is getting the lamps these days about $1000 for a pair. The biggest pain in the butt when servicing these things is doing the Low Frequency Maintenance kits where you have to replace all the fans INCLUDING the system fan underneath the lamp housings. Also it is a company called CyViz (pronounced Sy Vis) that basically slapped their name on the Projection Design bodies. The lens is worth more than the projector body! Fun fact, this company sold to Barco (a huge professional projector manufacturer) and after Barco basically trashed the company, the original founders left and formed a new projector company called Norxe AS that make projectors with a similar build quality.

Story time! Seeing those arc lamps in this projector stirred a fond memory. In the 1990s I worked for an industrial camera company on a model that would run at up to 100,000 fps. When we had the Alpha build strewn all over a test bench, we realized we had to bring whatever we wanted to image to it: It was far from portable! Shooting at 100,000 fps requires tons of light, and our initial attempts used studio floodlamps, which quickly heated the lab beyond the tolerance of the exposed system boards, even after adding fans. Someone had the bright idea to image a light source, so we pulled the video projector from our conference room ceiling and exposed its HID lamp. The video was beyond gorgeous, showing the arc writhing between the electrodes, with each end wandering on the electrode surface. Truly mesmerizing. We rushed to post the video to our website, mainly as a snub to our competitors in the high-speed digital video market. Within 48 hours, high-level Japanese executives from Epson (the projector maker) and Panasonic (the bulb maker) were on-site! At the time, powerful LED light sources weren't yet a thing, and the projector industry was stuck at 640x480 because HID lamp arc wander caused shimmering pixels at higher resolutions. These companies had been using film to capture the arc wander, which took overnight to process, meaning they could only do a single experiment per day. They begged to gain access to one of our first Beta units, and paid cash up-front for the opportunity. Story #2! I subsequently worked at an aircraft instrument company that specialized in making digital instruments that could be installed in the holes for conventional mechanical-electrical "steam gauge" instruments, avoiding the need to replace the entire instrument panel to install a "glass cockpit" system (easily $250K for even a small plane). Given the lack of small (3"-5") LCD displays with both adequate resolution and intensity, the system used a rear-projection system. Which, you guessed it, used an HID lamp for its high-intensity light source. To get the desired brightness and resolution, we needed to use separate R, G and B mini-LCDs, each fed by splitting and filtering the light from the HID lamp. Which wasn't very efficient at the photon level, meaning we needed a honking powerful HID bulb. But the result was simply amazing, as the rear projection allowed us to use a bezel far thinner than a flat display would have poermittited, yielding capabilities never before seen in a standard 3" aircraft instrument display. The system (the SN3500) took the market by storm and was an instant success. But it was very power hungry, and when we tried to include 5 minutes of backup power into the instrument, there was no way to get enough storage: For multiple reasons, we couldn't use lithium batteries or disposables, and there wasn't enough room for the amount of supercaps needed. This forced us to switch to using the then-new red, green and blue surface-emitting LEDs, which triggered a complete redesign of the projection system. When we got it working, we installed the light source and projector into our housing that was stuffed with as many supercaps as it could hold, fingers-crossed in the hope we could reach our 5-minute backup power duration goal. At maximum brightness, it lasted over 20 minutes! Meaning we could remove 75% of the supercaps and still meet our backup power goals. Unfortunately, those LEDs cost about 1000x the cost of the old HID bulbs, meaning we had to take our instruments up-market, forcing us not to rest on our laurels. We chose to sell the updated version of the original instrument at a loss to preserve market share (making the backup power capability an expensive option), while pushing innovation in new instrument functionalities (e.g., TAWS) and larger sizes. It was really cool to have been present at both the struggling end of the HID projection lamp era and the dawn of the high-power LED lamp era.

I'm a software engineer at Barco Norway (formerly projectiondesign) and it's fun to see a product from a company I work at torn down. I haven't personally worked on the F35, my work has been on Barco's newer products, but that projector has been so well regarded it's been in production up until 2019, having been first released in 2009, and have been hard to replace with newer products.

Big heatsink is for when no pixels are lit... the DLP will redirect the light onto a very black surface and the light is just burned off as heat.

Investor relations for TI here. Nice tear down. As others have said. DLP is very much alive and well at TI. Continues to be a nice business for the company with these being used in cinema, consumer projection, pico projection and automotive (Heads up displays and headlamps) to name a few applications. TI also builds the device in house as well.

Hi Dave, I work in Full Flight Simulators training center in Europe and we have those projectors fitted on simulators visual systems. They are branded as Barco, model FL35 with LED source of light (originally Projection Design from Norway, now Barco). We currently have 3 simulators fitted with this model, each visual system is a set of 3 projectors to cover 180 by 40 degrees field of view, for total number of 9 projectors. Our projectors are over 30k hours now 😅

Commercial AV engineer here. I don't normally like to talk about work on public forums, but thought Dave and a few others would appreciate the story. My employer installed six of these at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a 3D visualization lab. We made a rear-projection video wall three projectors across, and each third used two projectors for 3D (through glass polarization filters). I think they cost about US$35K each back then (in 2011), to include first two lamps (edit: but NOT the lens assembly, which I think was another $10-$15k each). The wall resolution was something like 6500x1600, allowing 15% overlap to blend the projectors together at the edges. (Bear in mind, this was 3D, so that was 6500x1600 for one "eye," so double that in pixels to render.) Required one HELL of a machine to actually drive the 3D display... Being 2011, we had four nVidia Quadros running in SLI to push all those pixels. I understand that room was chiefly used to review models generated by the Titan supercomputer two floors down. (They are now running Summit and Frontier; the latter I understand is currently in the Top 10 fastest list right now.) The models were largely centered around so-called "light water" nuclear reactors for power production. I also heard from the end user that the room was used by the US Dept of Energy to analyze the data from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and provide feedback to Japan on what actions to take to isolate the reactors and clean the mess up. It also didn't hurt the nerd cred to say I had a valid badge at ORNL back then. Nobody had to know all I was doing was maintaining these projectors (and the associated AV system). 😁 Amazing machines, though I'm substantially less impressed by the WB2560 Multiple Image Processing System we paired them to... Bloody SD cards. Thanks for the teardown. 👍

DLP is still very much alive. It's a business unit inside TI. TI makes the micromirror display chips, as well as analog and digital support chips. The vast majority of cinemas use DLP-based projectors. The DMD in your projector is in a hermetic welded ceramic package that TI calls a Type-A package. It's actually an LGA - the plastic interposer comes off.

DLP has always fascinated me, the fact that they can manufacture something mechanical at such a micro scale is mind blowing.

Fun fact: the input data rate for the DMD in this projector is 51.2 gigabits per second.

The prism is called a TIR prism (TIR = total internal reflection). It has a small air gap between the two halves. It discriminates between the incoming and outgoing light on the DMD (Digital Micromirror Device). When the mirrors flip, it changes the angle of the light and the air gap acts as a "switch" so only the "on" mirror's light goes to the projection lens.

Lamps in kit like this are usually high pressure mercury or xenon discharge.

The huge heatsink is needed to dissipate the light energy when you display black. The complex prism assembly is used to divert the light from the "black" pixels back to the internal heatsink.

DLP has always fascinated me. For a typical 1080p 60hz signal you have two million tiny mirrors moving precisely to generate the right light intensity, not just 60, but 180 times a second to get each color projected.

It's a beauty! I love how Dave saw the 11k used price tag later! About the original price... I have a feeling this is one of those "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."

The springs on the lens mount are for boresight alignment. This allows you to achieve perfect focus across the entire screen if the projector and screen axis are slightly off (projector not perfectly perpendicular to the screen). They force the lens mount away from the projector body, and turning the screws pulls one axis of the lens (X, Y or diagonal) in or lets it out. The screws should not be fully tightened. They should be about half the spring engagement as a starting point. This adjustment is different than the lens shift -- it "tilts" the lens in relation to the light path. The black painted portion inside the DLP housing is called the "light dump". DMD chips work by shifting microscopic mirrors. "on" pixels are reflected to the prism/light path and "off" pixels are reflected into the light dump.

Dude this is one of my favorite eevblog videos. Loved seeing the intricate engineering in this.

30:40 Some of the lenses out in the wild can get VERY expensive. Where I work, we have several installations that utilize custom lenses that have a price tag of around $95k each.

Dave, you've made me break my no.1 rule for watching YT: never click on any video that has "INSANE" in the title :P

The mirrors on thr edge aren't projected onto the screen. Theyre called the pond of mirrors. The are disabled (or rather, only allowed to turn off). The reason some are broght and some are dark is because they arent powered so tilt at different angles.

I mean 2560×1536 in 2004 with HDMI in is pretty insane for a projector. The first HDMI device released was a Panasonic DVD player in late 2003. Ironically the projector supported a higher resolution than the max of HDMI 1.0 which maxed out at 1080p. But 11k hours runtime and this low level of dust on the inside is also pretty good.

Whooooooa. Nice piece of kit. Absolutely friggin' magnificent. I'd totally see it in a NASA mission control room. Not a chance you'd find one in your dumpster, haha! Thing of beauty, joy for ever. If you didn't have a chance at true Norwegian black electronics, then you've gotta do a teardown of one of those lovely Tandberg tape recorders or other devices, they were and probably still are made in Norway and they're absolutely friggin' splendid in their design and build quality. Mold complexity 2*pi+9j, more complex than most complex numbers, haha!

I remember reading about the tech behind TI's micromirror arrays. I was completely floored by the unbelievable complexity! I'd like to know what the yield of these devices are. At 3.6K bucks each, I suppose it might not be very good. Anyway, fascinating teardown!

One of my customers used to use a trio of similar projectors to run the video wall in their power dispatch center. A couple years ago they were upgraded to monster laser based ones from NEC that are rated for 24x7 operation with a 20k hour lifetime on the lasers. Which is nice because they're right awkward to get to.

Would have been nice to see a minimal attempt to fix this beaut. I feel bad seeing it go to trash.

I have worked a lot with this brand of projectors. Its was a Norwegian brand Projectiondesign that have been bought up by Barco. Projectiondesign was big in the marked for custom tailored projectors. They had a bit "weird" thing where they did not had any completed projectors in stock, but they had all the different parts for standard projectors. When you ordered a projector you put in what features and specs you wanted from a list and then they quickly put together from the parts they had and was also very quick to make special parts. This type of projectors was used a lot in huge screens in the oil industries to show a large high resolution picture by either edgeblending several projector together (having pictures side by side with some overlapping) or/and stacking several to get more lights. This type of projectors was also used a lot in cinemas for showing the comersials before the old type film projectors was fully digital and used projectors. Those X-port bays was for having different types of input cards or processor cards for using with 3D images. They was very smart projectors and was very easy to stack together and/or use in a edgeblending application, even mapping the image to a curved surface was done easy in the projector. Some of the technologies that Projectiondesign was inventing is still in use of the high end Barco projectors today. Cyviz was one of the lines of projectors used in edgeblending systems.

Wow, one of my favorite eev teardowns in a while - absolutely stunning!!

I've torn down DLP TVs found at the recycler and they boggled my mind with the optics trains and color wheels and don't forget that DLP chip itself. It's damn near magic to me. I think the complexity is what draws me to them. I go for the dichroic glass doohickies. Fascinating tech.

The 29:54 incident light pointer from the 45 degree angle is the highlight of the *OLDER* dlp tech. The mirrors actually flip along the diagonal, thus requiring the light being fed onto the chip from that odd angle. There was some development to address this PITA aspect of the DLP so more modern parts have the mirrors as diamond shaped, flipping along the vertical axis - making possible to construct the light path in one horizontal plane - you know that by seeing how thin the new projectors are.

seeing dave play with the color wheel makes me feel justified in having done as such while tearing down an epson projector, they use magnesium alot in projectors, fun stuff and alot of good parts :D

*Stunning* _high End_ Optics,Electronics even Mechanics ... _flashed_ best EEV teardown *ever* ❤😊

35:50 -- DLP is very much alive and well. There currently is not a superior technology. 3DLP is better than single DLP in that it uses a dedicated chip for each color instead of one chip with a color wheel (these suck at high motion rate video, like live sports).

That DLP9000 I was able to pull the data sheet off Digi-Key. Looks like just that array would have been 1/3 the final price. Also pretty sure TI has the entire market cornered on the “DLP” technology. Don’t think anyone else makes them.

Amazing tech and fantastic video Dave. Thank you!

The lens flapping mount that you noticed around 16:00 that mounts the lens assembly on springs is properly called scheimpflug, it's used to allow setting the left-right / top-bottom focus, it's needed when you want proper focus and still want a little flexibility in the relative placement of the screen and projector.

I'm a medical linac service electrical engineer for a radiotherapy dept in a hospital in the UK, and this has been designed with the FSE in mind, likely heavily consulted! Minimise downtime by making it repair and maintenance friendly with little quality of life tweaks like the holes in mouldings for a screwdriver to a screw, rather than faffing with a right angle jobby I used to be a live event tech before that, and a lot of the professional light, sound, power distro, and rigging is designed with rapid service in mind - if only medical device companies cared about the engineers and techs in the field! One manufacturer has lead shielding around the beam limiting device (the bit what steers and shapes the x-ray photon/electron beam), to access many of the inner workings. This lead shielding comes off IN ONE ORDER ONLY, and lo behold any fool who didn't take note of block position, order, and alignment, because it isn't until one gets further to the end of reassembly that things become apparently fubar'd! So off everything comes and try again🤦‍♀️ And the CMM is... euphemistic in its disassembly/reassembly wording... "remove the lead shielding", "reassemble the lead shielding"...

Not often that you have that level of amazement! Awesome!

Huge thanks to Morton and Dave for this show and tell. That is end game hardware. Wonderful to see.

The spring loaded bayonet mount for the lens (probably) allows for adjusting the infinite focus also adjusting collimation of the lens to make sure it is aligned in the same direction as the light beam.

This is actually a mid-range projector. The likes of Christie (nee Electrohome) and Barco make stuff that makes this look cheap and tame. Even JVC in their vis-sim business have some very nice higher end stuff (which also makes its way into high end home theatre.) Plus Sony professional stuff. It isn;t hard to spend six figures, and the first digit isn't a 1. This projector supports Infitec stereo - which is a rather strange system that uses narrow bandpass optical filters to spit the light into six bands, with matching glasses where each eye gets three of the bands - and so you can split the projected light into left and right and retain colour. The colour rendering is not exactly fabulous, and needs pre-processing of the video to try to correct for the weird shifts. That alone used to take a FPGA to effect. Some of the filters you will see are to reject infra-red and UV. DLP chips have less than 100% coverage, and a big problem is the energy from light passing past the edges of the mirrors. Everything you do to reduce this helps. Heat and UV wreck everything eventually, so rejecting both early is important. Thus far TI are the only manufactures of DLP. Although the base patents are long since expired, the IP involved in fabrication is probably tightly held. DLP is very much alive. It is the only technology that can handle higher powers. So all your professional digital cinema projectors are DLP based. As are all the lower priced domestic projectors, and what are called Laser TVs for domestic use. LCoS (Still used by Sony and JVC) and LCD (Epson and many others) is around, but an't handle high power, and Sony have had lots of problems with it, to the point tat they exited the commercial cinema market. DLP remains dominant. TI are spruiking really cheap DLP projectors for use in everything - like a tiny projector built into the bottom of a car door that projects useful information onto the gourd when you get out. DLP has intrinsic issues with contrast, so there are limits to how good it can get. But its power handling still wins out if you want silly bright.

Big heatsink must be for the lamp. Im rocking a DLP projector myself, I love to imagine all the microscopic mirrors flipping and stuff spinning inside, all perfectly aligned

At a project last year I saw the tear-down of a Christie 4K40-RGB for repair and it was insane. I've never seen a commercial product quite like it. Hopefully one day something similar will show up for a tear down.

Scandinavian quality build. Dont scratch those expensive mirrors, they can be used in your optical uCurrent version.

Dave I finally retired my Planar triple DLP projector (one chip for each of the RGB) a few months ago having not used it for a few years. I can also remember going to Meridian Audio on a job interview and being given a tour of the facility where i was shown the calibration room for their DLP projector. It consisted of a Blacked out room with the production unit on test and a astronomy grade camera which was used to check alignment of the optics, this would have been in the early 2000's and the camera was like £100k but impressive to see the level they were going to for the optical alignment.

The springs on the lensmount are there so you can adjust the sheimpflug. Its an optical adjustment to get the projection sharp when off axsis setup.

Great teardown, no expense spared in that design

I love seeing high end electronics being taken apart. This one was great.

I am amazed with the engineering used in that beauty...

That is an amazing episode! :)

Wow that kit was a very generous donation to your channel!

I brought a smaller/cheaper/newer DLP projector to my daughter's school take-it-apart night a few years ago. It worked, but I thought the kids would enjoy taking it apart. It was quite similar to this one with many of the same parts, including an identical looking sensor. The biggest difference was that it had an LED lamp. Unfortunately, the kids got a bit too aggressive trying to get it apart and broke the glass color wheel and mirrors, but I saved the sensor. I also put it under a (cheap) microscope. This video is great because it helps me understand how these projectors work.

What a gorgeous teardown! Thanks for sharing this wonderfully engineered product! My main entertainment display is a Sony VPL-VW365ES 4K projector. Not DLP but I love it. In regard to your question why they'd have such an elaborate gear system for the lens shift, that it'd probably only be used once for initial setup, and I wanted to say that I'm constantly adjusting the zoom & lens shift of my projector (at least once every other day) depending on the resolution & aspect ratio of the tv show or movie I'm watching. If a video has the black bars on top/bottom (say, 2.35:1), like most movies use, I can zoom it in and go from 8' wide (where I keep it for 16:9) to about 10' wide. I then shift the lens up so the top edge touches the wall/ceiling edge of my wall. After watching, I shift/zoom back to the normal 16:9 aspect ratio of my streaming devices' main menus (TV, Roku, FireTV, 4kBlu-ray disc, PS5). I have less vert wall space available than horz, hence the zooming in/out. If I left the 16:9 fully zoomed in, it'd take up at about 5' or 6' vert and there's only 4' avail.

An amazing bit of hand assembled technology for sure. The nano DLP mirrors always amaze me.

Wow! I can‘t believe this is from 2004. It was toppest of top notch back in the day fir sure. I don‘t think I had seen a HDMI port in person in 2004.

The lamps and lamp drivers deserve a video of their own.

The springs are for adjustment of the lens alignment, that's why they're in a triangle configuration. Amazing piece of kit. Would love to have worked on it, must have been awesome to develop it.

I was in my last year of school in 2004 at University of Texas at Arlington for EE. I was taking a MEMS class and the professor had a person from TI come in to talk about the DLP chip and pass a sample chip aroud. It was so amazing at the time. DLP chips still have uses in SLA 3d printing. Top of the line DLP movie projectors used 3 DLP chips for each of the colors eliminating the color wheel and rainbowing issues.

Man, that’s awesome. Reminds me of Feynman’s talk about data on pinheads.

Watching your tear-down was beyond fascinating. But listening to your narration suggested me putting a gun to my head.

I tore down something similar and it is very impressive. Wow, those are some thick PCB's. :)

In my work place we have many of these, great product, also the latest FL40. In Europe these are Barco branded, we use them to project on a mylard on board full flight aircraft simulators, for pilots training.

Wow, that DLP chip is REAL holo! Very pretty! Almost a shame having it out in the air like that where it is probably getting damaged just existing.

I can't comment on if it is overbuilt, but it's certainly built like the 3 tube broadcast cameras I used to maintain back in 1990's.

The motorized fine X and Y adjustments may be needed to keep the image precisely aligned in a multi-image projector setup, so not necessarily used just once at installation

This thing would be so good to make a DIY advanced flight simulator cockpit setup. Might have been integrated in pro simulators with hydraulics motion explaining redundancy and the heavy design for a type of device that would hate to be tossed around.

The dark Portion in the bottom of the casing is generaly a light trap to change light into heat on a specific spot.

About a decade ago we used a very similar unit to provide rear projection of video for local television news programming.

I work with projector every day as a quality control engineer for professional video. I can tell you, we have way far more expensive material here, like a 100K Christie Griffyn or a 80Kg Panasonic RZ31K. That projector is in fact unknown to me and doesn't look that expensive at all. We work mainly with Panasonic, Epson and Christie and DLP is pretty much the standard in the pro industry.

I think the springs are for adjustments. When you have the lens on, you could perhaps adjust it a bit..

DLP has always been my favorite projection technology. Just seems like they're able to scale it to whatever you want to use it for. Want something small that attaches to a phone? Or something with insane output power like some of the big Christie units. One technology does them both. Still amazing to me. And to think, the original intent was a printer.

29:18 Both of those bga chips are the same thing.. Each one handles 50 percent of the pixels, and both are managed by the FPGA. The bottom one reqires a heatsink because its not directly by the airflow from the fan.

The reason for springs with lock-tighten screws is to adjust lens mount, like 3d printer bed.

That black area may be the light dump. From what I understand DLP mirrors split the light between the lens and the dump since different intensities are needed for each pixel.

@12:35 is for the rolling shutter effect because circles are dumb and hard

now all we need is a full $150k barco/christie cinema projector teardown

oh wow... the mechanical engineering team did some serious work. they didn't have to save money or cut corners on this design. im sure they learnt that lesson early on... that temp sensor is a perfect example. keep it off the main board... as long term temp differences will cause serious problems with mean time to failure projections. loved seeing an expensive piece of kit being used for a teardown. the last 10mins were amazing to get to see. just imagine what micro mirror technology will be like in a few more generations (if required).

Hi from one of your Norwegian viewers :)

Given the task at hand this projector is not really over engineered, the essential problem is one of vibration. On the projection side a pixel is just a few microns across, on screen side it's anywhere from 2 to 5 inches. Vibration needs to be contained. Not only that, but it's a stereoscopic projector meaning among the dichroics is horizontal and vertical polarization. There may also be a shutter mechanism in there for left and right eye separate as well. If you can't tell, I spent many years in this industry.

I'd love to get hold of the lenses mirrors and filters from this unit. I'm collecting lenses and mirrors for making a light table.

I dare you to put it back together and show it power on and still operate just as it did at the start of this video

Mikeselectricstuff did something similar a couple of years ago with 3 protectors that were designed to be stacked on top of each other and if my memory serves me correctly, they all worked. Even though the timers on the lamps were done.

Are those lens shift gears greased with... Molybdenum disulfide grease? Wow...

Looks like the barco fl35 it’s just a led version but still it has the ‘Rainbow effect’ like the color wheel, if you move your eyes fast.

IIRC you can test for magnesium in the alloy by putting some vinegar on it. Fizzing means it's magnesium.

I have a working Projection Design F3+ (1400 x 1050 native), is old, but working great.

Also if I had some of that beautiful of a component out of something I probably find some way to put on their glassware frame or otherwise who knows maybe potentially in resin somewhere I have been microdrive that somebody prepared for me exploded view with the parts in resin which is pretty cool it was a gift. And also an old hard drive as well couple of them it was a fellow computer enthusiast

please try and hook up some voltage to those DLP pins and see if you can get those mirrors to turn under the microscope

We played around with and disassembled a failing Sony Videoscope in my 12th grade high school electronics class near the end of the school year. It was nuts.

Nice Video

I think the curved streak on the filter disk segments is damage from usage. looks like it's going out from a slit between the filter segments, the form is due to air turbulence and what it is can only be speculated. either it's residue from something or it's damage to the filter surface.

12:26 It's a rotating circle, outside spins faster then inside. That's a short story. ;)

I do job once a week job at electronics recycling place and I have teared down multiple projectors. The TFT/LCD projectors have "X-Cube" piece of optics in them and I have few those as ornaments because they split light into RGB. :D Most expensive projector I have teared down was ~2500€ and I was shocked, since the projectors usually have only a bad lamp. The DMD chips probably have good % of gold in them also.

This is an impressive piece of engineering. I am pretty sure those motors and reduction gear trains would be used for adjusting offset and angle of the lens assembly to aid focus and manage keystone correction in any direction (where the screen is not perpendicular to the axis of projection). Low-end projectors manage keystone in software, but at the expense of image quality. Doing it purely via the optics ensures that a pixel on the DMD chip is still a unique pixel at the screen. As for the heatsinking - remember that the lamp source is on continually, and the DMD mirrors are bi-stable - they reflect light through the lens to the screen or away from it (using various forms of PWM for degrees of brightness of each colour component as the wheel rotates). If directing the light away from the lens, then the light is reflected onto a pure-black absorber and that converts all of the light energy for that pixel in that instant in to heat. So for a fully off display, all of the light energy from the lamp goes straight to heat. The heatsinking for the DMD chip deals with the heat from the light that is not reflected to the screen or the absorber which is mainly that which lands in the small gaps between the mirrors. TI spent a lot of time in developing DLP technology to maximise the ratio of mirror to non-mirror area since this reduces heat in the DMD device and also improves contrast ratio.

With those wires into heatsink at 28:05 - is that a peltier cooler?

DLP chips are in use when printing on photographic paper in fast printing machines, in this case, 20k prints/hour. Only smaller rectangle portion of chip in use. In case of failing single chip mirror on DLP chip, chip can be reorientated and adjusted accordinly. Never have need evenfor that during >10 years of operation ~8h/day. Projected image line sort of scans into constantly moving paper. Light amount fades away with each pixel line to make uniform image while paper advance is constanly monitored via exposure roller shaft. Dust is periodically removed from protective surfaces but it is not big deal. Light source LED unit ( originally 250W? halogen lamp with filter wheel, 10k prints/h) has quite faint leds compared to wall projector use. LED unit has been once replaced due to old gen blue led fading. These fastPrint 20 printers are manufactured by Imaging Solution placed in Switzerland. Laser w/single mirror printing is used in many smaller photographic paper minilabs.

All you need is two new XENON lamps and a projection lense and you could have a state of the art projector.

On a projector I owned long ago, the springs were so you could adjust the angle of the lens. When you loosen one side, it doesn't just flop around, but gives slight tweak on the lens alignment & springs keep everything held in place. No idea if it was the same for this one, but that's how mine worked.

Man, looks like an ASML machine. So much te technology in this thing

"gray bearded nude virgins with their tongue at the right angle." That line damn near made me choke on my food. ahahahaha

Nice projector, I have a DLP chip with failed mirrors, the seem to have broken free.