ion, or fast graphics are needed. But such projectors are also unwieldy and large (they can weigh 50 pounds or more).
LCD-based products have created a whole new market in the last few years for portable presentation
s. Products that offer the most convenience through their integrated light sources, therefore eliminating the need for a panel and separate overhead projector, should be the top sellers in this category (
see the chart
).
Integrated projectors resulting from a Seiko Epson/In Focus Systems collaboration typify this new breed. For example, In Focus's LitePro 580 costs less than $10,000 and weighs about 17 pounds, yet it projects bright and clear displays. "This is still a relatively small industry, and [the LitePro 580] has made a big impact," says Bill Coggshall, a projection market analyst at Pacific Media Associates (Mountain View, CA).
To generate clearer images, the LitePro 580 uses three monochrome LCDs instead of one color LCD (each LitePro LCD is filtered once, instead of filtering a single LCD three times). The three images are then recombined into a single color image.
The LitePro 580 is the first integrated projector to use LCDs fabricated with a high-temperat
ure polysilicon process. This process supports the fabrication of driver electronics on the same substrate as the light-controlling transistors, which cuts the size of a display roughly in half. Perhaps in a year or two, companies will migrate to a low-temperature polysilicon process, which has the same advantages as the high-temperature method but uses cheaper glass substrates rather than quartz substrates.
Integrated projectors that use amorphous silicon thin-film transistors (TFTs) could also get a boost with a technology recently unveiled by Sharp called Sharp2 '96. The company's new processes increase the amount of light that can pass through an LCD (aka the aperture ratio), which permits even brighter displays.
The company has already achieved an excellent 60 percent aperture ratio (today's laptops achieve about 40 percent to 50 percent aperture ratios per pixel), but the new process will increase this to 75 percent. Integrated projectors that use this new technology with 6.4- or 8.4-inch
displays are expected by the middle of the year.
A variety of new projectors based on Texas Instrument's Digital Micromirror Display (DMD) technology should also appear this year. DMDs are semiconductor chips that are made up of an array of thousands of tiny mirrors that can be tilted with the application of a small voltage. After years of development and reliability testing, TI is ramping up production to supply DMDs for a host of projection products. Market leaders In Focus, nView, and Proxima have all licensed the technology. DMDs promise high resolution and bright displays.
Allen Alley, vice president of corporate development and engineering at In Focus, says that these new technologies will lead to integrated projection products at several price-performance points. He says amorphous silicon products and single-chip DMD-based products will occupy the low end. Polysilicon LCD products will take the midrange, and three-chip DMD projectors will occupy the high end. However, given that many tech
nologies for integrated projectors are still under development, vendors couldn't say how quickly prices will drop.
Despite the uncertainties, analysts predict that integrated projectors will breathe new life into the projection market. Pacific Media Associates predicts that sales for all display products will increase by about 28 percent this year over 1995, compared to a 51 percent jump in integrated projection devices over the same period.
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The fastest-growing category in the projection display market is for integrated LCD projectors, according to Pacific Media Associates.
Au Revoir, Overheads
