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Paul Eueaut informs us that Graham Ramm, one of his course mates, has passed on. 

Unfortunately, we don't have any more detail.

*****

Robert Hill informs us that Erin Schmidt passed away on the 26th  May 2007, age 54.

Erin was a rad tech G in the RAAF for quite some years (70's and 80's). He was on Project Kedah which 
involved the refurbishment of the control tower at Butterworth. Bob Maney also knew Erin and said he

remustered from a Mech Fitter to a Radtech G in the 70's from Pearce.  Bob thinks he did about

12 years all up but lost track of him after Butterworth. Bob said Erin was a great bloke to work with,

one of those "gentle giants" where nothing overly bothered him.

If you're in the market for a home theatre projector, then you're probably confused by what the sales-people have told you. Some will say that the way to go is LCD (liquid crystal display) while other will tell you that DLP ("Digital Light Processing") is the way to go. What's the difference you ask????

Well, LCD projectors usually contain three separate LCD glass panels, one each for the red, green, and blue components of the video signal being fed into the projector. As light passes through the LCD panels, individual pixels ("picture elements") can be opened to allow light to pass or closed to block the light, as if each little pixel were fitted with a Venetian blind. This activity modulates the light and produces the image that is projected onto the screen.

DLP is a proprietary technology developed by Texas Instruments. It works quite differently than LCD. Instead of having glass panels through which light is passed, the DLP chip is a reflective surface made up of thousands of tiny mirrors. Each mirror represents a single pixel.   In a DLP projector, light from the projector's lamp is directed onto the surface of the DLP chip. The mirrors wobble back and forth, directing light either into the lens path to turn the pixel on, or away from the lens path to turn it off.

In very expensive DLP projectors, there are three separate DLP chips, one each for the red, green, and blue channels. However, in most DLP projectors under $20,000 there is only one chip. In order to define colour, there is a colour wheel that consists of red, green, blue, and sometimes white (clear) filters. This wheel spins in the light path between the lamp and the DLP chip and alternates the colour of the light hitting the chip from red to green to blue. The mirrors tilt away from or into the lens path based upon how much of each colour is required for each pixel at any given moment in time. This activity modulates the light and produces the image that is projected onto the screen. (In addition to red, green, blue, and white segments, some colour wheels.

So which is best??  One benefit of LCD is that it has historically delivered better color saturation. LCD also delivers a somewhat sharper image than DLP at any given resolution.

When it comes to home theater, DLP has continued to make competitive advances in color, contrast, and image stability that have served to make it the preferred technology for home theater systems. But the fact is that both DLP and LCD continue to improve, and both are capable of delivering much higher quality video for home theater than they ever were before.

Which technology is the best? Well, it depends. Both technologies have advantages, and both have weaknesses. Neither one is perfect for everything. So the technology war continues, and the only clear winner in sight is you, the consumer.