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

[surstrmming]

The new Swedish "OptiLight" projector for should drive prices down later in 2004. It's expected to retail for $500.

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.

Re:Cost

[MoonBuggy]

In the shop I work in we demo projectors regularly. 1000 lumens can be seen adequately when projected through a sheet of perspex onto a blue wall in full indoor lighting. On a proper white screen with the lights dimmed 700 lumens should be fine. Even better for lumen-optimisation is using it to project onto a sheet of paper from behind - looks like a nice flatscreen TV, very portable and doesn't depend on light conditions nearly so much.

If I were buying a proper projector for home cinema I'd go for 1900+ but something cheap and portable to show up charts or a slideshow of my graphic work would work fine with 700.

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).

Re:making a big screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if lots of these min-projectors could be put together in a matrix

Surely you meant:

Now, if lots of these min-projectors could be put together in a beowulf cluster ...

Re:making a big screen

[wideBlueSkies]

>>small screen TV (32")

I remember a time, not long ago that 32'' was considered big screen.....

Now you need a room with an empty wall the size of Texas for a big screen TV. What's next, wrap around TV for 2 or more walls?

wbs.

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.

Re:Power Consumption

[Baumi]

Every electric and electronic appliance should go for that goal.

I don't know - my matchbox-sized fridge isn't selling too well...

Jens

Vaporware!

[jonnylawUSA]

Sounds like these guys will be up for the 2004 Wired Vaporware awards.

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 see only services offered...

[NotQuiteReal]

... no product.

I am sure something useful will come, eventually, but don't hold your breath waiting for anything cool to buy any time soon.

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.

Fake...

[loony]

Little info and terms like "Photon Vacuum" make this thing sound like the next high end graphics card from the bitboys... If they had a usable product they would give you at least some information - especially since the design is according to them patent protected...

Mirror from creators website

[Anonymous Coward]

The projector:
http://www.upstream.fi/index.html

The Technology
http://www.upstream.fi/technology.html

Upstream's unique and revolutionary technology, called Photon Vacuum, practically maximizes the amount of photons sent to the target from the light source in a minimum space. This is not an easy trick since the etendue law of light in physics requires more space for better efficiency. Our special technology enables us to get rid of a variety of components currently used in projectors that unnecessarily waste energy. The current table projectors extract typically only a few watts of light power out of 200W of input power.

Photon Vacuum enables the smallest projector designs in the world, ultimately to a size of matchbox. It is possible to push the power consumption of the whole device ultimately to below 4 watts while still gaining a travel-TV sized color projection. There are a myriad of possible applications for this technology.

First in the world, Upstream Engineering introduces a revolutionary optical technology that will enable video projection from matchbox-sized device running on batteries.

Our expertise covers all the necessary areas from micro-optics to low-power digital electronics. We design custom projectors based on our unique technology.

website down

[Andreas(R)]

The website is slashdotted, here's a screenshot of the projector:

.

Pretty Nice

[CrypticSpawn]

For people who are often going to meetings, this makes it pretty quick to set up, could go off your laptops power source so no need looking for an outlet, no need to adjust it, nice and fast. If it is priced correctly, I would even buy it just to have since, you never know when a gadget like this will come in handy. Ok okay, yes I was the one to buy the USB laptop lamp, and no I don't use it :(

This + Cameraphone

[Apreche]

Put one of these in a cameraphone. You'll soon have people giving slideshows of the pictures they took on vacation straight from the phone. oy.

Vaporware?

[Zone-MR]

Their website doesn't even feature a single photo, prototype, or past products. I'm surprised this article was even approved. It certainly looks like yet another one of those companies which try to persuade people to buy shares, counting on a 'revolutionary' product which the company is unlikely to ever succeed in producing.

What technology?

[arsenix]

Are they sure they didn't mean photon vapor? I hear they are working on fusion as well...

Pocket projectors from other projects

[pacc]

Optics.org had an article
this summer about a pair of other pocket projector projects. These includes using an array of lasers to limit scanning or a single higher powered light-source. If 'pocket' is the only thing that matters you might also look into a development of normal bar-code scanners.

Look at a calendar

[Mononoke]

April 1 is still weeks away.

Someone jumped the gun here.

Dream on!

[Tchaik]

Do you actually believe that you can project a reasonable image with _4 watts_ of power? You need energy to create photons. Even with zero heat loss, you can't get a luminous image out of 4 watts. This is vaporware at best.

Re:Dream on!

[mindstrm]

Really?

So... at 100% conversion, how much power does, say, your average 17" monitor put out in terms of light? (not counting heat, etc)

You might be surprised just how bright 4 watts of pure light is.

a 100W tungsten incandescent light bulb is about 2.6% efficent.... or 17.5 lumens/watt so 1750 lumens.

Good tungsten halogen bulbs, 3.6% (3.6W) or 2500 lumens for a 100W source.

So.. a matchbox projector with 4W of output with a 100% luminous efficiency would give us, say, 650lm/W * 4W = 2600 lumens...

If you google around for projectors, you'll find that for $2000 you can get around a 2200 lumen projector.

That's a 200W lamp.

Re:Dream on!

[rco3]

Given: 4 watts of total consumption to achieve a travel-size TV projection.

Assume: 2 watts of that are dedicated to the generation of light for that projection.

Possibilities:

1) Use a white light source, which means (for that size and power level) white LEDs. Those are commercially available at 25 lumens/watt. This gives us 50 lumens, which will not make for a wall-sized image viewable except perhaps in pitch-black darkness. However, for a smaller image... say, 16"x12"? ... this is equivalent in brightness to an 1800-lumen projector making an 8' x 6' image. That's fairly bright...

By 2005, 60 lumens/watt white LEDs will be out of the lab and into the market. This allows for our hypothetical projector to realize 120 lumens, or roughly 1/10 the output power of an 1100 lumen projector. You could make a 32" x 24" (40" diagonal) image at the same brightness as that 1100 lumen projector makes an 8' x 6' image.

2) use multiple colored light sources, again LEDs. Most of the 'brightness' comes from the green, less from the red, least from the blue. You can assume 50 lumens / watt off the shelf right now, which probably means a 32" - 40" diagonal image from those 2 watts, at the same brightness as an 1100 lumen projector making an 8' x 6' image.

Conclusion: *current* technology allows for TV-sized images to be produced, at brightnesses similar to those of larger images from brighter projectors, from only 2 watts of input power to the optical source.

Sources: Don's LED Page.

Disclaimer: comment author has been an A/V professional since 1987, holds masters in EE.

Re:Cheap!

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

get smaller, cheaper and more high quality?

Pick 2. you can't have all three.