PROJECTORS Smaller, Brighter & Lighter than ever

They're the prime directives of projector technologies: brighter, lighter, and cheaper. Still, some projector technologies fall outside the parameters of these three areas. One technology in particular could make life easier for video producers-if only they'd be given the key to unlocking its potential.

"We'll see projectors with digital rights support within two years," says Martin Reynolds, a research fellow at the Gartner Group, based in San Jose, California. "It looks like they're going after the encrypted DVI spec that's out there. There's a lot of support for it from the Hollywood crowd, and it solves a problem that they can't otherwise deal with." Reynolds points out that you can't effectively send MPEG-2 video through a 1394 port. "It isn't good enough, and you end up putting the decoder in the projector or the monitor, which has all kinds of problems associated with it."

In Reynolds' digital rights scenario, each device in the chain acts as a gatekeeper by looking for the authorization code within the data. "It does a key exchange, and once the key exchange is done the data stream starts running," he explains. Once the gate is opened, the video signal can move directly to the projector. "You can't intercept it, so you can't pirate it."

Reynolds sees copy-protected projectors and monitors as Hollywood's way of preparing for the inevitable arrival of a higher-capacity, higher-resolution media delivery system. "The thing to watch out for is some kind of HDTV digital disc. It's going to be important to the whole strategy as we go forward. How do you produce something that has the equivalent quality of, say, a 70mm film that's digital? The projection systems are getting there but we don't yet have the media systems to do it."

He predicts we'll see a single media standard built around the current DVD; most likely, a multilayer DVD disc that uses a blue laser. "Only we've got to have much better intellectual property control on it," Reynolds qualifies. "The movie studios keep coming out with these really cruddy IP control methodologies that don't work. But the [Communiqué] readership, who is going to be editing and processing this kind of material, needs ways to read and manage the content. At some point we're going to see the movie studios wanting to send their full-quality stuff out for processing and have it come back, and they want the whole thing to be secure. They won't want to send pieces of Star Wars out if little cottage-industry editors are able to rip it off. It all comes back to the intellectual property chain. So I think the IP chain is going to be very, very important."

That's Entertainment
Why is Hollywood so interested in building intellectual property controls into projectors when most of the projectors are used in conference rooms for PowerPoint presentations?

Sweta Dash is the director of LCD and projection research with Stanford Resources Inc., a research firm based in San Jose, California. She says that projector manufacturers are just beginning to establish a foothold in the home. "Only a few DLP projector companies are currently selling into the home theater market," she explains. "In the future, we think there will be a blur of the markets. People will buy projectors for business, but as more and more home theater features become integrated into the business projectors, they will use them for home theater as well as business. Right now, people who are using these business projectors are taking them home to watch movies or football games."

Before consumers will purchase projectors for their homes in significant numbers, the projectors will have to offer features that are better suited to displaying movies and television. "Most of the data projectors can handle video, but home theater has different requirements," says Dash. "Consumers want a higher contrast ratio. The color and picture have to look close to what you would expect from a CRT. And most home theater buyers prefer the 16:9 aspect ratio."

Believe it or not, 16:9 projectors are just around the corner. "We'll finally see some 16:9 projectors come out," says Bob O'Donnell, research director for device technology with IDC, based in Framingham, Massachusetts. "We saw a bunch of them at CES in prototype form, based on Texas Instruments' 1280 x 720 DLP chip. All you have to do is slap that into a projector and you have an even 16:9 that can do a full 720p for video."

Price Points And Poundage
There's another prerequisite for projectors moving into the home: Prices will have to come way down. Dash expects low-end projector prices to dip below $2,000. "A lot of people are talking about hitting that $2,000 price point," she says. "I think it will take some time before the average price will go down to $2,000. People assume that will increase consumer demand, but there's still a lot of work to be done before the consumer market can really pick up."

One new technology that might help to drive down the average projector price is LCOS (Liquid Crystal On Silicon). It's a reflective LCD that's made with traditional semiconductor techniques rather than the usual LCD production methods. "It combines brightness and low costs," says O'Donnell. "Light doesn't have to go through it, which means, theoretically, that it's going to be brighter. You'll be able to stamp them out as chips on a wafer. The chips are less expensive to manufacture, therefore the whole device should be cheaper." Sweta Dash points out that the economic benefits of LCOS are indeed theoretical because manufacturers "have to do larger-scale production in order to bring the costs down." She also thinks that it's important for LCOS to move toward more lightweight form factors. "Everest has showed an eight-pound LCOS projector, and many companies are working to introduce a LCOS ultraportable projector," she explains.

How lightweight can manufacturers make their projectors? Two-pound projectors are expected soon, but what about one-and-a-half pound projectors, and or even one-pound projectors? O'Donnell thinks we're starting to reach the point of diminishing returns. "Once you're under three pounds, being under two is not that big of a deal," he says. "The bigger deal is going from ten to three." Dash says much of the credit for the downtrend in size belongs to advances in lamp technology. "With fewer watts, you can have a brighter output and overall smaller size," she explains. "That's why a really small projector can be so bright." Dash says the current three-pound DLP projectors were helped by the movement from 0.9-inch to 0.7-inch panels. She anticipates a similar reduction in weight when the industry shifts to 0.5-inch panels.