QUOTE (Mikau @ Sep 26 2005, 12:51 PM)
Just wondering, in some experiments I've had the bulb very close to the lcd, but my cooling system kept the lcd at a safe temperature. I was thinking, maybe I could get a collimator with a shorter focal length to capture more of the bulbs light?
Oppinions?
I asked the same thing in another thread and got this response from supraguy...
QUOTE
QUOTE(SupraGuy @ Sep 22 2005, 10:59 AM)
Why not to use a shorter lens:
In short, the square law. The amount of light hitting the lens diminishes as the square of the distance from the lamp.
On a small lens, this doesn't amount to much. For a 15" lens, it does.
Take a 220mm lens, 15" across.
The distance from the center of the lamp to the center of the lens is 220mm, but using pythagoras, a^2 + b^2 = c^2, a=220, b=190.5 (7.5") we get c=291mm At a distance of only 311mm, you get only 1/2 of the light intensity that you get at 220mm, so you can see that there's already a signifigant difference.
Now, if we change a to 110mm, then we get a c of 219mm. This means that the corners will have less than 1/4 of the light that the center would have. This is SEVERE dark corners, and would be clearly visible to anyone. (Basically the center of the image would be 4X brighter than the current image center, and the corners would have at best the current center image brightness.) This is too great a gradient.
Conversely doubling the FL of the collimator fresnel would improve lighting evenness greatly, but would result in an image of only 1/4 the current attainable brightness.
essentially from that I think it means it would capture more light but the differential brightness between the corners and the center would be too noticeable....