Brillian Corporation, the new name for Three-Five Systems' (Tempe, AZ) (www.three-five.com) wholly-owned microdisplay subsidiary, teamed up with 3M Optical Systems (St. Paul, MN) (www.mmm.com) to produce an RPTV demonstrator with the highest on-screen contrast to date - 2000:1. The set was shown in a private suite at SID'03, but will be unveiled to the public for the first time at the Projection Summit conference in Orlando, Florida.

The Brillian/3M engine can be produced for about $1,000 in quantities of 5K units per month - reasonable for its leading performance levels.

Brillian/Three-Five also showed a 46-inch wide-aspect RPTV in its booth at SID that offers very good visual performance too. This set uses its 0.5-inch XGA resolution LCOS panels (1024 x 576 pixels active) and a mini-quad color management system. Co-designed with ADO (Westlake Village, CA) (www.adv-opt.com), the engine can be contract manufactured for only $800. Brillian dabbled with getting into the engine business in 2002, but with its recent spin-off, will instead concentrate on making LCOS panels.

Brillian has made a lot of progress recently and its panels and projection systems deserve a new and serious re-evaluation.

The 65-inch demonstrator uses Brillian's new high-contrast LCOS panel (BR768HC). It is a 0.7-inch device with 1280 x 768 pixels and offers a 92% fill factor, 66% reflectance, and a 9 ms response time (120 Hz frame rate). Dark state uniformity is speced at >80% with white state uniformity at >95%. The device features analog gray level control and so requires 3.3V and 15V power supplies. Panel contrast is rated at 2000:1 and lifetime should be more than 20K hours.

Brillian CTO Robert Melcher declined to provide any more details about the liquid crystal mode that the company uses to obtain such high contrast. Similar panels made using a TN mode produce contrast of only about 600:1. We can only guess that Brillian has developed a VAN mode cell to achieve such high contrast.

To produce a three-panel engine and RPTV demonstrator, Brillian teamed up with 3M Optical Systems. 3M has developed the "Vikuiti Optical Core." This color management kernel consists of three Cartesian PBS assemblies and a color combiner X-cube. A Cartesian PBS distinguishes polarization states based upon material axes in the PBS rather than relative to the reflectance plane. As a result, the Cartesian PBS assembly is quite different from a conventional MacNeille type cube PBS. Instead of layers of thin films between the two cube faces that separate light by polarization, 3M has developed an 892-layer optical film that does the polarization separation. 3M spent a great deal of time evaluating this multilayer optical film in a glass cube and plate configuration, but ultimately decided the glass cube configuration was superior because of reduced back focal length, better aberration control and easier engine design.

The Cartesian PBS is constructed by using two triangular pieces of PBH56 glass. A slab of PBH71 glass and the multilayer optical film are bonded between the two PBH56 glass elements. The PBH71 glass is needed to correct for astigmatism introduced by the index mismatches. One PBS is used for the red and green channels while a different layer configuration is needed for the blue channel. This 3-PBS core can accept 0.7-inch imagers (16:9) or 0.57-inch (4:3) imagers with f/2.3 telecentric optics.
Performance of the 3M PBS assembly is impressive with transmission of over 90% over the visible spectrum with an f/2 beam of light and contrast exceeding 1500:1 at all wavelengths. If the contrast is measured at f/2.4, the f-number where the engine will operate, then blue contrast typically exceeds 2000:1, green exceeds 4000:1, and red is usually greater than 6000:1 (with a mirror/mirror plus QWP). 3M says the Vikuiti Optical Core has a uniform dark state because there is no thermal birefringence while the circularly polarized output light minimizes screen birefringence effects. Since no post analyzer is needed with this high-performance PBS, the core saves costs and increases brightness.

An engine using the Vikuiti Optical Core and three of Brillian's BR768HC LCOS panels was built into a 65-inch RPTV cabinet. It uses a 100W lamp (Phoenix 1.3mm arc) and produces 430 lumens (color-balanced to D65) at the back of the screen. Using a DNP screen, about 400 nits of on-screen brightness was achieved, but with a Toppan screen, about 500 nits can be realized, said Brillian marketing manager, Rainer Kuhn. Only the central 1280 x 720 pixels were driven to display on the wide-aspect screen. On-screen sequential contrast with the Brillian panels was measured at 2000:1.
A first-generation demonstrator developed by 3M used a 100W lamp and 0.7-inch JVC panels with only the central 1280 x 720 pixels active. That system achieved 400 color-balanced output lumens with sequential contrast of 1050:1.

	This new second-generation system with the Brillian panel is quite impressive. We saw it at SID and found the images were definitely high contrast with a crisp overall image quality and well saturated colors.
This is by far the best demonstration Three-Five/Brillian has put together yet and will grab lots of attention going forward.

This new second-generation system with the Brillian panel is quite impressive. We saw it at SID and found the images were definitely high contrast with a crisp overall image quality and well saturated colors. This is by far the best demonstration Three-Five/Brillian has put together yet and will grab lots of attention going forward.

Work remains to be done, however, as some of the whites were a bit washed out and the darks need more definition to bring out details. There was some electronics noise and vertical banding that was the result of using display driver electronics designed for Brillian's other LCOS panels and not the new high-contrast ones. Kuhn says this will be straightened out soon, with a reference design and qualification units ready by Q3'03.

Was it the "top display at SID"? It was certainly at the top of my list. Great job!

Brillian, Rainer Kuhn, 303-332-6154, rkuhn@mail.35sys.com
3M Optical Systems, Mark Schuleman, 651-733-4069, mlschuleman1@mmm.com

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