Nano, Pico, Pocket, Personal, Game, Combo - are all names to describe new classes of projection products that many in the industry see as the next wave of innovation - one that will hopefully take the consumer market by storm in the next 5 years and drive healthy growth. Today, Epson and Philips announced an agreement that will help move along the "Personal Projector" class of product.

Chris Chinnock
Senior Analyst and Editor
for Insight Media

Epson says that it has developed a new reference design for the personal projector that will be shown at Projection Summit and InfoComm next week. The new projector features two types of 3LCD panels coupled to the Philips Ujoy lamp.

But this is not a run of the mill business projector. First, it will be aimed squarely at the consumer market where it can be used to project up to 60-inch images from a camera, camcorder, PDA, multimedia player or game console. With the popularity of Nintendo’s Wii game platform, Epson is probably going to target this application.

Other innovations will include new styling that will reflect the new use models and consumer orientation of the projector (translation - this won’t look like a traditional projector). The resolution will be a standard SVGA format, but the light output level will fill a hole in the current projection range - one the Ujoy lamp was designed to fill. According to Philips officials, Epson is likely to be able to achieve about 300 lumens for the projector - much higher than the 50-100 lumens from pocket projectors, but less than the 700-800 lumens from some dedicated home theater projectors. This seems like a good market opportunity.

On the other hand, the projector won’t be sold on its specs, as most business projectors have been. Instead, it is likely to be marketed as a lifestyle display device. It looks like the first products may reach consumers by the end of the year, with volume production in 2008. The price point will be interesting too - likely to start at $399. This is more expensive than the Wii, iPod or DVD player to which it is likely to be connected. When the accessory costs more than the product, this causes some concern about commercialization prospects.

Apparently, those fears have been eased. Epson has not yet announced any customers for the projector, but it is a conservative company and would not make such an announcement unless it planned to offer an Epson-branded product, or it had a design win for another company to take the product to market. And, by offering a reference design, other engine makers can buy Epson panels and build their own personal projection engines and products.

Epson will apparently offer two 3LCD panels for the projector, as detailed in the table. The much higher aperture ratio of one panel suggests this is coming from a later generation design (perhaps a D7 process). But to hit the desired price points, which is lower than almost any projector on the market today, these panels, lamps and other components need to be inexpensive.

Philips’ Ujoy lamp is a 50W model that leverages technology developed for its higher power UHP lamps. The lifetime of the lamp is specified at 2000 hours and is not likely to be replaced during the lifetime of the product.

Philips has also engaged with Sypro/Jabil and Coretronic to develop DLP versions of the personal projector using the Ujoy lamp. We expect to see about six of these DLP-based projectors at InfoComm next week.

In addition to Epson, a second Japanese company has developed a personal projector platform too. The good news is that the 3LCD solution appears to be lower cost than the DLP approach, which will allow makers to quickly get to the $399 price point that most see as necessary to open up the market. This is a market segment we will be watching carefully.