If you talk to Karl Guttag, CTO at Syndiant, he is adamant about it: Syndiant color sequential LCoS technology is the best imaging technology for picoprojectors. Of course, this is what one would expect the Syndiant CTO to say and you will certainly hear a different story from companies like Texas Instruments, Micron and Microvision.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

On the other hand, Syndiant is so sure of itself, they are going to display six picoprojectors side-by-side at their booth at SID during Display Week, and repeat the demonstration at Projection Summit, June 7-8. Guttag said, "The purpose of the demo is to show all the available Pico Projector technologies on the market so people can see them side by side with the same lightning and image content. We believe that Syndiant’s technology has advantages in resolution, color, size, and power efficiency over the competing technologies and that a side by side demo is the best way to demonstrate the differences." Or more succinctly, "We got tired of waiting for a "shoot-out" so we did one ourselves."

Insight Media had seen a similar side-by-side demo with four picoprojectors in the Syndiant suite at CES 2010, and reported on the results in the January issue of Mobile Display Report. The SID and Projection Summit demonstrations, however, will be public, not private events so you can judge for yourself.

The six picoprojectors in the demo will all be projecting on different portions of the same Da-Lite matt white, gain 1.0 screen. All will be showing the same content simultaneously, making for easy comparison. Guttag supplied Insight Media with the photo in this article showing the six picoprojector images together. Additional material content will include videos, spreadsheets and text-based documents.

In addition to the images, the demonstration will include three key items of information on each picoprojector: resolution, lumen output and power consumed. The resolution was based on the native resolution of the imager, the power was measured using a laboratory power supply and current meter and the lumens were measured in an integrating sphere. According to Guttag, "For the lumens measurement, I let all the projectors work in their brightest and widest full screen mode, letting them warm up for about 15 minutes before measuring the power and lumens."

The Syndiant demo will be in booth #1605 at SID. Insight Media will also have a booth, #1408, so feel free to stop by and say hello to us.

An expanded version of this column will be published in the upcoming issue of Mobile Display Report, available on May 17th.