Global solution of achromatic Total Internal Reflection prism in projection system

Abstract

In this paper, an achromatic total internal reflection (TIR) prism set, consisting of two stacked prisms, is designed to reduce the lateral color aberration of a mini projector with light-emitting-diode (LED) light sources. Two different types of the prism set are proposed. Type 1 prism set is the first prism with a small Abbe number material stacked with the second prism with a large Abbe number material. By analyzing the optical properties of the proposed ATIR prism sets, we are able to choose an appropriate optical material combination of the prism set. For type 1 prism set, the corresponding lateral color aberration is 0.65 mu m and the size is 2306 mm(3). Nevertheless, the type 1 suffers from efficiency loss of 15.5%. For type 2 prism set, the corresponding lateral color aberration is 0.61 mu m and the compact prism size is 3000 mm(3). Although the size of type 2 prism set is larger than that of type 1, the efficiency loss can be as low as 1%.