Matchbox Sized Color Projectors?

Justin Nolan sent in a very brief link about ultra small projectors which says "Upstream Engineering is willing to provide miniature color video projectors for use with portable video player, travel TV, laptops and handhelds next year. Upstream's patented technology, called Photon Vacuum, maximizes the amount of photons sent to the target from the light source in a minimum space and allows the creation of devices free of a variety of components currently used in projectors that unnecessarily waste energy. Photon Vacuum enables the smallest projector designs in the world, ultimately to a size of matchbox. The company says is going to push the power consumption of the whole device ultimately to below 4 watts while still gaining a travel-TV sized color projection" You can also read Upstream's website for almost as little information.

Comments

Cost

[cartzworth]

Are they going to be 2k US+ like conventional projectors? Will they force the price of conventional projectors down?

Re:Cost

[jafiwam]

Yeah, and at 700 lumens you'll have to climb in a cardboard box to see the thing.

Other portables are around 1000-2000.

Wall/ceiling mounts are 3000-4000 lumens.

You get what you pay for, even if it is Swedish.

making a big screen

[DavidDeLux]

Now, if lots of these min-projectors could be put together in a matrix, will this mean that, finally, big screen TVs can be produced more cheaply. (If one mini-projector does dead, just swap it out).

Power Consumption

[Jotaigna]

Thats the spirit. Every electric and electronic appliance should go for that goal. While the effort to finally get a cheap, clean and reliable source of energy is good, we must for once pay attention to nature and reduce power consuption to a minimum, that would buy us some time or being able to rely in smaller sources of energy like wind or solar pannels. Size does matter!!,
Although I dont know what im going to do whith such a tiny proyector, maybe i'll put it in my back pockent and sit on it afterwards and break it. Or have it stuck in a child's ear.

Ubiquitous Projection

[BlueTooth]

Obviously this would hinge on cost, but I seems to me that this would make it much more practical to integrate projected images through a living or work space. A lot of futuristic concepts include projectors in their design, but these units are always large and ugly. Having projectors conveniently displaying information and entertainment (TV, artwork, notifications, etc.) on surfaces throughout the house would be "really neat"

I call BS

[MythMoth]

There's nothing on that site to indicate that they're anything other than vapourware.

It doesn't follow that it's impossible - on the contrary, I think this is a technology we'll be seeing very soon - I just doubt that it will be from this company.

So why do I think we'll be seeing it soon ? Simple, grasshopper. Lasers. It's easy enough to build a poor quality monochrome vector display out of a laser diode and a couple of mirrors on motors. That's expensive and clunky.

A laser diode and a couple of piezo-transducer-mounted mirrors would be a slightly more elegant mechanism, and if you can build a vector display with this, you ought just as easily to be able to build a raster display.

So all we're missing is the cheap green laser diode and the cheap blue laser diode to complement the existing cheap red laser diode.

Now, you CAN buy a green laser pointer that's only moderately painfully expensive - and now that there's an imminent demand for blue laser diodes for high density DVD players I'm hoping their cost will plummet.

I don't have the skills to build this, but I'm hoping someone will get onto it soon.

D.

Re:I call BS

[srleffler]

There are blue laser diodes on the market now too, I believe. They're probably still too expensive.

I don't actually expect laser projection displays to go anywhere. The advantage of a laser for projection is its high brightness (intensity in a small area). That's great for vector display where you want to "draw" bright lines. When you use a scanning laser for a raster display you lose this advantage, though. You need the same amount (intensity) of light with a laser as you would with ordinary projection. Unless the laser is more energy efficient than the ordinary projector, you're better off with the latter.

There are also safety/legal issues with laser projection. Any laser bright enough for a large projection display is dangerous if it stops scanning. The projectors of course have interlocks that shut off the laser if the raster scan jams or stops, but such a system could fail or be defeated by someone with malicious intent.

I predict Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

A brief google of "photon vacuum" comes up with a series of papers in the realm of quantum physics http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/29/1/311.

I need to finish reading what papers I can find regarding this concept, but so far it looks like something still in the arena of pure science. One article also refers to carbon nano tubes, so if this isn't vapor ware it will be expensive.

Re:Vaporware!

[booch]

I was thinking the same thing. The biggest tip-off is the talk about maximizing the amount of photons. Really, that's just techno-jargon saying that they want the screen to be bright. Any time you have to resort to techno-babble to explain simple things, it means that you probably can't even do the simple things, much less the difficult things.