TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Lasers Enable Smarter Home Theater Projector

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 10-13-09 | Comments

Smarter 3D home theaters project a 100-inch display with red, blue and green lasers for ultra-bright images at a fifth the power consumption and half the cost of plasma displays.

Smarter 3D home theaters project a 100-inch display with red, blue and green lasers for ultra-bright images at a fifth the power consumption and half the cost of plasma displays, according to Los Gatos, Calif., startup, High Definition Integration Ltd (HDI). By using lasers as the source of illumination for high definition (HD) stereo 3D projectors, HDI aims to seduce the high-end home theater market with its Switchable Dynamic Video Projection Display.

"We use the same architecture as the high end iMAX 3D--two projectors to combine the left and right 3D images on the same screen. But ours is a much smaller, lower-power package, that uses only one lens," said Ingemar Jansson, Chief Executive Officer at HDI. "Our market will be home theater owners who want the absolute best quality 100-inch screen that looks fantastic in HD and fantastic in 3D."

Rival home theater 3D systems multiplex the right and left eyes using active shutter glasses that always have one eye turned off to black, resulting in flicker. On the other hand, for HDI's Switchable Dynamic Video Projection Display you wear polarized glasses like they give you at the 3D cinema, with parallel hardware projectors simultaneously supplying both left and right polarized images to the screen. Your eyes get separate but continuous images with no flickering.

The smarter part of the architecture is the clever way the inventors combine the three lasers in moving stripes of color so that a single liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) microdisplay (per eye) can display all three colors from the red, blue and green lasers (RGB). Two LCOS microdisplays--which are similar to a Texas Instruments digital light processor, with pixels that are either reflective (like a mirror) or black--overlays oppositely polarized 1920-by-1080p images (one for each eye) illuminated by all three lasers at 360 Hz per color.

"We are using two HD resolution LCOS imagers--one for each eye," said Jansson. "We are doing it per eye--so we are not losing any resolution and very little brightness."

The Switchable Dynamic Video Projection Display uses three one-watt lasers (RGB). Limited availability forces HDI to manufacture its own fiber-optic-based laser assembly, which houses one blue and two red lasers (one of the reds is frequency doubled to produced the green laser).

"Today the lasers are very expensive, but when their prices come down because of mass production, then we can think about making smaller screens," said Jansson. "We are planning on pricing our home theaters at $10,000 to $15,000, and think that we can deliver about 10,000 units at that price starting in 2010."

HDI is privately held and funded so far, and wants to stay that way, preferring to partner with manufacturers with a vested interest in 3D HD systems over giving up equity shares of their company in return for funding from venture capitalists.

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