Projection light engines require lamps that can deliver high brightness, temporally and spatially stable light of constant colour, created as a point source, over extended lifetimes. Mercury-based UHP lamps dominate the current market, but fail to satisfy the design requirements in stability, luminance and colour constancy and operating lifetimes.

Ceravision has developed the Continuum 2.4 technologies to deliver the following benefits for projection systems:

• Extended operating life of up to 50,000 hours
• Excellent lumen maintenance
• Absence of electrodes eliminates wall blackening and sputtering issues
• Absence of expensive, and potentially troublesome, electrode seals
• High radiance continuous spectrum source
• Gaussian profile plasma column directly accessible to collection optics
• Benign lamp chemistry giving stable CCT and CRI
• Mercury-free lamp doses are standard (however, mercury may be a dose component if required)
• Larger colour gamut and red content than very high pressure, short-arc, electroded mercury lamps
• Flexibility of dose chemistry enables design for colour temperature and colour rendering properties
• Low UV content associated with the high Ra visible emissions from many molecular radiators
• High system efficiency and high coupling efficiency of microwave power to the discharge
• Rapid run-up time and short restart-times
• Highly scalable in terms of total power and dimmable over a useful range of power
• Simple manufacture (assembly of components that can be multi-sourced)
• Rugged
• Suitable for 24/7 operation