Why do they still use xenon lamps, even though LEDs are more efficient.
In: Technology
They’re *really* bright, and need to be to have light reflect off a movie screen for bright and clear picture.
LED with similiar luminosity density to xenon arc lamp, will require active cooling, like noisy fans or complicated liquid cooling.
It’s very difficult (expensive) to create a LED projection system that has the required color rendition and brightness.
* Color rendition. Cinema xenon bulbs can produce pure white light ([100% CRI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index)) which is hard to achieve using LEDs. Most high quality LED lights are around 90-95 CRI which may fall short of certification requirements.
* Brightness. It takes extreme brightness to light up a cinema screen, because the light has to pass through a medium then get reflected by the matte screen some distance away before reaching our eyes. As an idea, most projector LEDs are barely adequate for home / office use (around 2000 lumens of brigtness). A cinema projector might need 40,000 lumens. An IMAX projector might need 600,000 lumens.
Instead of LEDs, manufacturers are switching to RGB lasers in their new generation high-resolution projectors.
not all cinema projectors use xenon lamps.. the problem is most of the “industrial” sized projectors are really expensive, and you’d want to eek out everything from that investment before buying a new one. newer cimena’s mostly have some variation of laser based projection – they are better than LED in contrast and brightness that LED or Zenon’s cant match.
Simply Money.
Replacing cinema projectors is extremely expensive. These aren’t your 500-$1000 home projectors. These are upwards to $200,000 network connected projectors and when you multiply that by 10 to 24 or more screens in a multi plex theatre, it’s just not feasible to replace ones that currently function perfectly fine.
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