What is Color Light Output and Why Does It Matter?

When you compare the published lumen spec of a projector to its actual tested color brightness, the former doesn’t always measure up.

Imagine you purchase a new high performance vehicle rated at 420 horsepower, yet when you drive the car it just doesn’t seem like it performs like a 420 horsepower vehicle should.

After researching a little more you find that the manufacturer rates the horsepower as measured on an indoor track with an artificial tailwind, but in real driving conditions the measured horsepower is more like 150.

I realize this is a bit unrealistic, but so is providing brightness specifications on a projector purely measured on the output of white light.

I was recently made aware of the new Color Light Output (Color Brightness) standard that was published in May of 2012 which now not only measures the brightness of White Light Output or White Brightness, but also Color Light Output or Color Brightness.

Additionally I was surprised to see that projectors from some of the most well know manufacturers in the industry have a significant difference between their published lumens spec and the tested Color Brightness.

In many cases the tested Color Light Output was less than 25% of the published lumen spec and some are even more extreme, for example a WXGA projector rated for 7500 lumens that had a tested color light output of only 1250 lumens.

Almo Professional AV.

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