A prism that splits light into two beams of differing wavelengths (color). They are usually constructed of one or more glass prisms with dichroic optical coatings that selectively reflect or transmit light depending on the light's wavelength. That is, certain surfaces within the prism act as dichroic filters. These are used as beam splitters in many optical instruments.

One common application of dichroic prisms is in some camcorders and high-quality digital cameras. A trichroic prism assembly is a combination of two dichroic prisms which are used to split an image into red, green, and blue components, which can be separately detected on three CCD arrays.