Hughes Aircraft Company

John P Garcia

Ronald S Gold

Jerry E Freeman

John T Montroy

A projection system wherein two or more separate display sources, such as high brightness sources, or active matrix liquid crystal display (AMLCD) or other flat panel displays are used to write information directly onto a display screen, or onto a photoactivated reflective light valve for projection onto the display screen. Sequential imaging apparatus is used to alternately generate first and second images for display. For example, such images are coupled to the photoactivated reflective light valve and an illumination source is employed to illuminate the light valve and project a composite image onto the display screen. The flat panel displays may be transmissive, reflective, or self-emissive with the use of an optical shutter. A writing illumination source is used for non-self-emissive flat panel displays. Using high brightness display sources, the images may be directly written onto the display screen without the use of the reflective photoactivated light valve and the illumination source. In the present invention, each video frame is divided equally among the AMLCD/flat panel displays either spatially or temporally, and the flat panel displays are optomechanically multiplexed or optically shuttered by a multiplexer, thus imaging partial frames of information sequentially or completely onto the photoactivated light valve. This results in a complete frame or sequence of frames written onto the photoactivated light valve and displayed on the screen. The present invention reduces the data rate requirements on the image sources by a factor of two, four, or more. This is a significant advantage for super-definition projection systems with multi-megapixel count requirements. Blemish/defect mitigation is achieved by alternately writing to the flat panel displays using a ping-pong approach with one-to-one full resolution flat panel displays.

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Tucson, AZ, United States of America

John P Garcia