I arrived Wednesday evening at CES at about 5:30, and by 9:30 I had seen 3 laser or LED projectors worth writing about. I am here to see what is new in projection technology and I consider that a good start.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

I arrived too late to go to the Casio press conference, but I did get a chance to have a long chat with Casio’s Joseph Gillio and see a demo of Casio’s newest product at the press-only event call Digital Experience. The outside appearance was about the same as the older members of the Casio super-slim projector series, but what was inside came as a surprise.

Casio has eliminated the mercury vapor lamp (i.e. the UHP-type lamp) used in virtually all its business projectors. They have replaced the lamp with a hybrid light source. It uses a Red LED and a blue laser. Green comes from a phosphor wheel, part of which is clear to transmit the blue laser light and part is covered with a green phosphor to convert the blue to green.

Previous laser and LED projectors had relatively low output, ranging from 10 lumens or less for picoprojectors, up to 160 lumens for pocket projectors and as much as 700 lumens for $15K home theater projectors. This is not for Casio–the 2000 lumen output and $799 price for the XJ-A130 I saw aims squarely at Casio’s normal market of road warriors and conference rooms. This XGA projector will be available in February. The light source will last an estimated 20K hours, Gillio told me, and the entire projector including the light source will have a 3-year warranty. Gillio agreed that $799 was high for a 2000 lumen mainstream projector, in part because you can hardly buy a projector with only 2000 lumens. However, after you have replaced a mercury lamp twice, the $799 price will start to look very good.

Additional models with XGA and WXGA resolution and up to 3000 lumens will follow before the end of Q1 2010. According to Gillio, after the end of Q1 Casio will not make projectors with mercury lamps in them anymore. Color gamut is an additional advantage of this projector, which has a 50% larger gamut than Casio’s lamp and color wheel based offerings. 3D versions are likely before the end of the year.

The two other laser or LED type projectors I saw were both demonstration units. Light Blue Optics (LBO) has been working on holographic laser projection (HLP) for several years now and they now have a demonstration unit that has the look and feel of a product. The big problem with HLP in the past has been the real-time conversion of the video signal into a hologram. The LBO demonstration unit finally does this with an ASIC fabricated for them by Toshiba to a LBO design. Lasers are from Opnext, Photop and Nichia respectively for red, green and blue, and the design uses a FLC phase-modulation panel from Micron. Output was 15 lumens with video material and the equivalent of about 35 lumens with graphical material such as a virtual keypad. It was also differentiated by the integration of a touch sensor to allow interaction with the downward projected 10" image. Chris Harris of LBO said he hopes this technology will show up in a commercial product by the end of 2010.

The other projector demonstration I saw was based on the polarization grating (PG) technology from ImagineOptix. This technology allows the use of both polarizations of light from a LED in an LCoS or transmissive LCD system, without polarization conversion or recycling. The demonstration unit uses a LED source from Goldeneye and a panel from Syndiant. It looked surprisingly good, since according to Erin Clark, president of ImagineOptix, the demonstrator had been assembled that afternoon in the Planet Hollywood Hotel. Syndiant was going to arrive later that evening and help them tweak the system so the image should be even better tomorrow.

While perhaps the Casio announcement breaks the most new ground, obviously laser and LED projection is on a roll. Read all about it, plus all the other news from CES, in the January issue of Mobile Display Report or the February issue of Large Display Report.