Illumination system for a projector composed of three LCD panels

Abstract

A novel compound prism device consisting of a cubic polarizing beam splitter (PBS) and a non-polarizing dichroic prism is configured as the core component of the illumination unit of a full color projection display system of three pieces of reflective type liquid crystal imaging panels. When the in-coming light beam impinging on the PBS at 45 deg. of incidence, the beam component polarized perpendicularly to the plane of incidence is reflected and directed toward a LCD panel of red-image signal addressed after transmitted through a red-passing dichroic filter. The beam component polarized in parallel with the plane of incidence of the PBS is transmitted and passing through a red-cut dichroic filter. The rest portion of the light beam is then got the blue and green color bands separated by the dichroic filter at 30 deg. of incidence and directed to a blue and green signal addressed LCD panel respectively. All the dichroic filters are designed polarization independent and the PBS has a high contrast ratio of 1000 for the on/off states of teh addressed pixels of the image panels. The color separation and re-combination prism unit will provide a screen uniformity of d(u',v') <0.01 when it is accomodated in the projector with a projection lens assembly of F/#2.4.