Short interview with Syndiant's CTO

Yesterday, Syndiant has sent us photos showing their 6-way projector shootout, comparing 6 different technologies. Visitors to SID (starting next week) will be able to check this personally, but in the meantime, we asked Syndian't CTO (Karl Guttag) a few questions on the setup and about Syndiant's pico-projector technology.

Q: The 6-way shootout is very interesting. How can we be sure that you guys are objective?
The demonstration has a mix of image content from personal to business applications so people can see and judge for themselves. We are doing the comparison at SID and Projection Summit where the audience is technically knowledgeable about displays. We are showing the electrical power consumption of each projector as measured with the same lab equipment. While there are some design differences in the video input capabilities of each projector, we think the Lumens/Watt is as close to an apple to apple system power comparison as we have seen done.

Q: Can you tell us which projectors are used in this setup?
Syndiant is a microdisplay supplier and not a projector maker and the purpose of the demo is to compare the various technologies and not the projectors themselves. Besides, we consider the other projector makers as being potential future customers for Syndiant.

We picked the "display technologies inside" and not the particular projector brands for our demonstrations. We tried to cover all the technologies that are being discussed for pico projectors. All the projectors selected are within about 20% of the same power consumption (generally 4 to 5 Watts for the whole system). The projectors in the demo are:

    Color Filter LCOS - A 640x480 color filter LCOS panel which is what many of our competitors use to demonstrate the supposedly bad color capability of LCOS, when in fact, this is only an issue with color filter LCOS.

    FLCOS - The 640x480 (VGA) Ferroelectric LCOS (FLCOS) was the first color sequential LCOS pico projector on the market. It turns out, we have the same LEDs and optics as this FLCOS projector uses in our prototypes so that we can demonstrate that our device delivers about 1.4X the lumens per Watt of power and higher resolution for customers by upgrading to our device.

    DLP® WVGA - The new 848x480 DLP® based projector lets us show our advantages in resolution. We are demonstrating much better resolution, better color depth, and increased brightness at about the same power. The WVGA DLP uses a “diamond” pixel arrangement that requires scaling that lowers the effective resolution below its stated resolution of 848x480 pixels.

    DLP® HVGA – This is demonstrating the DLP at 480x320 with “square” pixels. We wanted this to be the newer nHD (640 x 360 pixels) design but it was not available. We wanted to make a point that the “new” nHD DLP was going to have only 1/4th the pixels of our upcoming HD products.

    Laser Beam Scanning – The projector claims a resolution of 848x480 pixels. People can judge for themselves image quality and speckle issues compared to the other displays. In addition to the image quality compared to the LED projectors, it may surprise them how much power the LBS consumes and how hot it gets.

    Syndiant's SYL2041 – Our projector is using the same LED and optical engine as the 640x480 FLCOS projector but we replace the FLCOS device with our display. We are able to demonstrate about a 1.4X improvement in the lumens per Watt and a 1.56X increase in resolution over VGA as well as a 1.18X in the number of pixels over the DLP and LBS with WVGA.

Q: Will you be showing new modules or projectors at SID beside the 6-way comparison?
We will have some other joint development projects at the two shows to demonstrate privately.

Q: What makes your projector technology better than other LCoS technologies?
Syndiant has developed an all-digital microdisplay technology supports field sequential color. Our technology is demonstrating advantages in light efficiency, color quality, and size for a given resolution.

Q: We are currently aware of only one projector using your technology (The AAXA L1). Are there any others?
The AAXA L1 (and Laseno) is currently the only product on sale in with our panels in them but that is going to change soon. There are a number of large companies that are working on products using our microdisplays that should be in the market this year. 

Q: Back in CES you have shown two upcoming pico-projectors by Foryou (designed by Astri). Any news on these?
The CES 2010 demo was an early technology prototype and Astri/Foryou is continuing to work on some interesting products but I can’t go into any details at this time. I would like to let your readers know that The Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) is going to be presenting a paper at Projection Summit titled “LED-based Ultra-compact Optical Engine Design” that I expect will tell more about their work.