In early 2004, Texas Instruments (TI) announced an addition to its DLP technology stable, a feature it called SmoothPicture. In a classic attempt to squeeze a quart from a pint pot, these new Digital Micromirror Devices (DMDs) would deliver HD resolution from an ostensibly lower-resolution pixel array, boosting the performance of home cinema DLP projectors. TI remained resolutely tight-lipped about its execution but did specify the resolution of these HD3 and xHD3 DMDs at 720p and 1080p respectively, but left the AV community to guess the rest. Which, thanks to the World Wide Web, it did. The murk of misinformation only thickened when, some months later, Hewlett Packard announced a system it called Wobulation. AV folklore would suggest that SmoothPicture and Wobulation are one and the same thing, with the latter supplanting the former as the term of reference. Naturally, the two processes are quite distinct and this month we'll begin by taking the lid off Texas Instruments' technological marvel. Next month, we'll circumnavigate Hewlett Packard's world of Wobulation.
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