MTT showed its High Contrast HDR projection prototype at Siggraph that truly was an impressive demonstration, The group said the technology is about 18 months out and works with existing projector heads.On the digital projection front, along with the breaking news of the Barco dual laser (DP4K60L) soft launch (Getting Totally Immersed in Ford’s Booth), we found traditional projectors like Epson’s short throw and the Vision Series line Digital Projection displays. These have been covered in other Meko publications. We did, however, find one other projector of note, from MTT Innovation.
Called a ‘disruptive light engine for high output display applications’, the projector is based on a new light steering architecture. The company said that this new system is built on commercially available components. In their process, light is steered to form images, rather than being blocked. It offers up to 90% efficiency over the traditional light blocking method, said MTT.
The high contrast HDR technology uses spatially coherent laser light the group dubs ‘Limelight’, which works together with the MTT control firmware that does the image processing and system control. According to the group, the solution can be added to various projector heads including Christie, Barco, BenQ, Sony, JVC and more. Both monochrome and colour prototypes were shown. The monochrome demonstrated a 20x increase in performance (from 12 cd/m² reference frame to a whopping 1000 cd/m²). The colour version showed an almost 600 cd/m² boost from a reference of just 20 cd/m² in the conventional projector. MTT also showed a full colour, high power projected image that was real-time processed to Rec 2020 PQ HDR standards.
Make no mistake, it’s still early days for the MTT technology, with a roadmap that includes demo technology well into 2017, with consumer mass production (MP) to begin in Q4 of that year. Professional (retrofit) cinema MP is slated to start by mid-2018 with stand-alone Pro Cinema projection available in 2019, according to MTT’s reckoning. The MTT intellectual property includes 18 patent filings in key areas including system level architecture, image processing and light source and optical design.
