Patent 7434944 was granted and assigned to Konica Minolta on October, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In an image projection apparatus, the deflection axis of the pixels of a display device is parallel to the longer sides of the display area of the display device, and the entrance pupil of a projection optical system is displaced from the line normal to the center of the display area in the direction parallel to the shorter sides of the display device. The distance from the display device to the optical component closest thereto is determined based on the intersection between the lowermost ray of projection light that leaves the lower end of the display area and reaches the entrance pupil of the projection optical system and the uppermost ray of illumination light that leaves the illumination optical system and reaches the upper end of the display device.