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Harrods Sells Holographic TV
beuh_dave writes "Harrods is selling a holographic TV, CLARO, for £15,000. The Holoscreen is a revolutionary holographic film which displays any image fed through a projector at a specific angle on to a transparent display. All other light is ignored. The result is a remarkably bright and sharp image quality - even in brightly lit environments."
It looks great. If money was no obstacle...
40" transparent screen !! nice : )
this one is a better link to the currently /.-ed site..
I was down there last week, and despite the fact that it's not actually 3D, as the "holographic" would suggest, it does look pretty cool. It basically looks like a sheet of glass with a TV picture hanging in the middle of it - it's bright enough to look good and sharp under showroom lighting, too.
Not sure it's worth the extortionate price tag for what's essentially a novelty toy, though.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
It's actually much cheaper... you can get them from around 2.5 thousand pounds...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
It has been around for a while...
. html h tm
http://www.exn.ca/Stories/2003/03/18/56.cfm
http://www.anders-kern.de/presse/pr_holoscreen_en
http://www.innovations-vcs.co.uk/main/holoscreen.
You can buy your own one cheap here:
http://www.av-sales.com/html/svs_holoscreen.html
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Exactly.
:)
Holographic means that you are producing/storing a diffraction grating. It doesn't even mean it looks 3D (like the 3D laptop screens - they just have 2 images, that's not holographic).
Btw, my job is to make holograms
Its the "one way reflective material" thats the cunning part, and what you pay all the money for. The surface treatment of the glass 'screen' is what is holographic in this instance, not the image that is generated, which is just a flat TV image. The hologram is such that from your viewing angle, light just passes straight through the glass plate, but from the projectors angle, the glass is opaque enough for an image to form on it like a conventional screen rather than passing straight through like it does the window on a projector booth at a cinema). I don't think you could generate the 40" hologram at home as a DIY solution!
As an unwashed Yank, I gotta tell my fellow compatriots who don't know (of which there are more than I imagined) that Harrod's is a large department store in London, in the Knightsbridge section of town. Now, that is also like saying that Microsoft is a profitable company.
Harrod's is an amazing store, 8 stories high if I remember correctly, owned by an Arab oil family who's son died in the car crash with Princess Diana. The first floor houses a food court the like of which you have never seen, with every food imaginable. The next couple of floors is devoted to clothing, which is someone boring, although Mrs. Scalesinger got herself a fine looking hat in their haberdashery. Then the floors start to get interesting again, with a large section devoted to true antiques for purchase, going all the way back to the stone age. That depaertment made me somewhat nervous, as it is museum quality with the added spice of "you break, you buy" hanging over the department. Oh yeah, a pub in the basement of the store wheeeee!
If they have an electronics department (which I guess they have to, from TFA) I don't recall it, as I was so overwhelmed from the rest of the store. Highly pricey and eminently touristy, it is stil a can't miss experience that I enjoy every time I am fortunate enough to be on that side of the big drink.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Maybe it's not really "holographic", whatever the quotes mean, but it is really holographic. It's not a sci-fi holoscreen, but it still uses holography to project a picture.
You could say that "Their techniques could be called precise DIFFRACTION", but then again, that's precisely what holography is.