Syndiant's CTO has started to write a blog, and has given us his views on the different Pico-Projection technologies. Syndiant are working on field sequential LCOS microdisplays, driven by either LED or laser. Obviously he's not objective, but it's interesting to hear what he says:
- DLP is going to be too expensive, take too much
power per pixel and be too low in resolution to have a long life in the
market
- Laser Beam Steering (LBS) is far too expensive,
has electronics that are large and power hungry, has high speckle
noise, low color depth, poor bright field uniformity, scaling and
distortion that lowers the effective resolution, brightness that is
limited to ~10 lumens due to safety regulations, and the list goes on.
- Color Filter LCOS is too big, the color saturation
is poor and it does not scale to high enough resolutions to be
practical in the long run.
- FLCOS is a near-eye (viewfinder and headset)
technology that is being adapted to pico projectors. It uses a type of
liquid crystal that, while fast switching, only allows the light to be
on for about half the time - a big drawback for brightness in a
projector. Additionally, the smallest available pixel sizes are large.
He's convinced that laser projectors are just not viable. Microvision will soon release their own laser-based projector, and then we'll see what the market says. We have visited bTendo, and they have shown us their laser based projector, and you can see how it compares to LCoS or DLP for yourself (although the photos does not show the speckel problems).
