DLP Television Purchasing Advice
DLP TV's look similar to the old-school projections TV's, except that they are table models that are thinner and do not go all the way to the floor. Unfortunately, the last company producing DPT TV's, Mitsubishi, quit making DLP TV's in 2012.
Pros:
- Huge screen sizes and good picture quality at reasonable initial cost
- Fit nicely into many existing entertainment centers and TV nooks
- High brightness and good black levels give excellent contrast ratios
- Immunity to burn-in
- Fast response for video gaming
Cons:
- Limited lamp life- The mercury vapor lamps in these sets last, on average, 4,000-8,000 hours and cost $150-$300 to replace. Of course, average means that some will last longer, and some will fail sooner. If a lamp lasts 10,000 hours, great! If you're the guy whose lamp fails at 2,000 hours, you won't like it much. The replacement lamps come in a cartridge that is easy for a customer to replace with nothing more than a screwdriver. Any special tools needed come with the new lamp.
- Strobe effect- A DLP TV contains only one imaging device, the Digital Light Processing chip. To make a color picture, it passes the flashing black and white picture through a rotating wheel with red, green, and blue color filters. This means that the red, green, and blue parts of the picture flash onto the screen in sequence. When considering a DLP TV, visually scan the room around the TV while watching the set out of the corner of your eye. You may see the picture break up into separate red, green, and blue pictures. If this bugs you, don't buy the set. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, don't even consider a DLP.
- Color wheel- For many years, TV's have been purely electronic devices. Introducing a motor-driven wheel into a TV seems like a huge step backward in reliability. In fact, color wheel failures are the second biggest cause of DLP problems, next to lamp failures.