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Matchbox-sized Laser Projector
soupisgoodfood writes "Light Blue Optics Ltd. have developed a laser-based projector called the PVPro. It's small enough to fit into a cellphone or PDA.
Some specs: Supports resolutions up to 2048x1280; No moving parts; Infinite focus; Green monochrome, with a colour version expected late 2006; Max consumption of 1.4W with an average of <350mW.
Looks a like a good solution to the increasing problem of smaller devices trying to display more information."
Price?
Uh huh. And why would this stop you from also having a more discrete display?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Has anyone seen a picture of the projector in use?
Definetly has me interested, Especially a color model. If they can replace all of our LCD based projectors with a laser one thats absoletly quiet and virtually maintience free for not much more than an current LCD/DLP projector, then they definetly got my attention.
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Ok, so there's pictures of it sitting next to a penny, and in the hands of some dude. How about a picture of it projecting something?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I hate getting ripped off by projector manufacturers who charge me in the hundreds of dollars for projector bulbs that (a) cost a fraction to make and (b) burn out in much less time than advertised. Sure, this built-in to a cell phone could be fun/useful, however my immediate need is a projector for my laptop that is small, robust, doesn't consume *very* expensive bulbs, full color and high resolution. This device may not be there just yet -- but it appears to be within spitting distance. If this company can't get there -- someone else will. All this I applaud.
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
No moving parts is neat - the galvanometers they use for laser-light shows are a colossal PITA.
I'm expecting to see game consoles that don't need a TV anymore - would be super-portable.
Now, the question is when we can couple this with pupil-tracking to draw the images directly onto the retina. I want my metaverse.
Naa, it's blue-violet... use it and you'll get some shity colors. For some reason, the human eye perceives some red in the violet (the sensitivity function of the red detecting cells is bimodal with a small bump in the violet)... so as long as there is some red in your image you could compensate it by lowering the amount of red but you won't get true-blue. Oh well, maybe not that much of a problem, after all, the brain perception of color is relative to the context rather than absolute, so in a dark room this would give good results, but not in a lighted environment with color references.
\u262D = \u5350
Some news stories don't need them, but anytime a press release comes out about some new visual technology (eInk, laser projectors, etc), I get annoyed that they can't show the technology being demonstrated. Sounds more like vaporware and a company trying to get investors excited to dump millions into them before finding out the technology isn't feasible and walk away with those millions leaving the company bankrupt.
Rant aside, if this technology DOES exist, it is very cool. Integrating a projector into mobile devices or notebooks is great, but considering the resolution, it would a great Home Theater projector as well. Laser light remains strong and bright over long distances, so in theory, you should be able to get big screens in the home without worrying about dimming the image.
The only thing I worry about is that while having a high resolution, laser is such a highly focused light that will these "pixels" be too separated to offer a decent image? Even at 2000+ points across, if those points are spread out too far apart, then you won't get a decent projected image. Chances are, mobile applications where you can shine the image a few inches or feet away is probably all that laser projectors are good for. Throwing the image across 20 feet, while still bright, might separate the pixels too much and make for a poor image.
So far, it looks like this company is just looking for investors, and as such, I would consider this vaporware. They are definitely looking to bank off the success of iPod video devices as well as the current fad of displaying television on Cell phones.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I can find little information on the companies website. They claim that it has "no moving parts", and that it uses "Computer Generated Holograms" and that it uses some kind of micropixel display.
They say that because they can focus the laser so well, the computer generated hologram can be very small.
They say that the system works by "steering light" instead of blocking it (an LCD array blocks light to modulate it).
Anyway, none of this tells me very much. Are they using a piezoelectric mirror to scan a laser across a hologram, that bends the light to scan the image? Are they using a 1D mirror or LED array and then scanning that with a piezoelectric mirror/hologram? I assume that a piezoelectric mirror moves so little and so robustly that it's not considered a "moving part".
What is the particular brand of magic that these people are using?
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Three Hundred Fifty Milliwatts is 0.35 of one Watt. Most lasers are under 50% efficient. The deflection and modulation and optics are unlikely to be more than 50% efficient.
So imagine spreading 0.090 watts of light over a screen-sized area. Pretty dang dim! Like you'll need dark adapted eyes to even see the picture.
Still a neat device, but you're not going to run your own Drive-in movie theater with it.
Old school projector bulbs do get bright enough do use with modern projectors. There are still two problems with them though. First, the light is not white at all, it tends a lot toward yellow, which is unacceptable for a color projection. Second, to deliver that much light, they draw anywhere from 600-900 watts. That hurts in two ways, heat, which puts a strain on size and cooling methods. People don't want that much noise in their living room. It also cuts into the only advantage, which is cost. 600 watts vs 200 watts will cost an extra $180 in electricity over 3000 hours at .15 cents per KiloWatt Hour. So there really is no advantage at all. They are the best technology for the purpose. Don't you think if there was something better in an up and comming market like this someone would be selling it? The world is not out to get you.
This is not true, blue laser light specifically around the range of 473nm is becoming increasingly more advanced. Remember when red solid state lasers came around, a simple pen type red laser would cost upwards or $100. Then you could find a crappy keychain one in the 90's for 20 bucks. But at that point green pointers became popular, but the price tag when they were released was also extremely high, now this cost has become more manageable, I recently bought a standard 5mW 532nm laser pointer for $50 on ebay. Blue lasers are following the same patterns as red and green lasers, however, their progress is a bit slower since it uses less common materials, the ticket price on a 5mW is still around $900-1000. I am sure that soon enough we will find that blue lasers will also be selling at the dollar store, while yellow pointers are being sold for $100 (yellow lasers are currently being sold for ~$1200).
Let's do the math. The screen is 15" diagonal (NOT 15" viewing distance). At an aspect ratio of 16:9 that's a screen that's about 13"x7" (I'm using exact values in the calculations). So, calculating area and switching to sane units, that's a display area of 0.062 m^2. If this thing does 200 cd/m^2 at that distance then it's putting out a total of 12.4 cd, at a power consumption of between 0.35W and 1.4W.
Now, let's say we want a 64" flat panel display. At 16:9 that would be about 55"x31", or an area of 1.13 m^2. Our little projector will only do about 11 cd/m^2 on that. Not good.
BUT... if the technology can be scaled to higher powers:
to get back to our 200 cd/m^2 for the big screen experience we need about 18 times more power. That is, between 6.4W and 25W, assuming no extra losses when scaling up.
Just for fun, I checked out home theatre projectors. I found one at 750 lumens, another at 1200. Let's say 1000. That's 25 candela. SO, to get equal performance to the standard projector we need to put out twice what we are. We might expect a power drain of 700 mW - 2.8 W. Not bad!
Surely they can make this thing put out twice as much light as it does... in fact, we might expect the full colour version to put out three times as much light, which (unless I made a mistake) should make it brighter than most home theatre projectors. Presumably they can do that in something that's not much bigger than, say, a cell phone. Provided this thing works, it should be pretty cool.
Having worked with much bigger lasers than the pointer in question for a number of years, I still think the whole thing is ridiculous. An average green pointer with a divergence of 1.5 millirads will produce a spot about 9 feet across at a distance of 3000 feet (the distance at which the guy convicted was said to have been), and assuming an output power of 5 milliwatts and absolutely no scattering, that works out to around 550 nanowatts per square inch. It's nighttime, so let's assume the pilot's eyes are fully dilated to 6mm, which means that if the laser hits him directly, each pupil will receive around 30 nanowatts of power.
It might be a noticeable blip in your field of vision at night (certainly less than the airport beacon lamps), but no one can convince me that it's enough to even dazzle someone. It's definitely an immature thing to do, and I might even go along with it being a misdemeanor offense at the state level, but it's certainly not worthy of a 20 year sentence. I especially liked how the guy was charged with "lying to federal officers", while our government apparently feels no shame in doing the same to the citizenry.
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