A new method is proposed for the design of the dichroic mirrors in 3-LCD projection systems for color separation/composition. Rather than simply basing the color performance cirterion on luminance or chromatic saturation only, the optimum design parameters can be found by maximizing the volume of the perceived color gamut in RLAB color space and related color appearance model and used the linearly approximated spectrum of dichroic mirrors for simplicity and vector space description. By this method, we found optimal half-power wavelengths in dichroic mirrors which maximized our performance criterion.