Laser - Page 3

Check out this nice video - a guy hooked up his Microvision Show WX laser pico projector with an iPhone to create a 360-degree gaming device:

The Show WX is now shipping for $549.

DisplaySearch has released a new report (Pocket Projector Technology and Market Forecast Report) in which they forecast that pico-projector shipments will grow from 500,000 units in 2009 ($117 million in revenue) to 142 million units in 2018 ($13.9 billion).

DisplaySearch says that progress in brightness and battery life and a cheaper price will drive the growth. Shipments of embedded projectors will surpass those of stand-alone units by 2014. DisplaySearch further predicts that DLP and LCoS field sequential technologies will take the lead in shipments in 2010. Laser-beam-steering (or scanning MEMS) will be the fastest growing technology.

Market research company Yole Développement says that the market for indirect-emitting green laser diodes with reach $500 million by 2016 (more than 45 million devices). This will be driven mostly by pico-projectors. They estimate that in 2010, there will be around 0.5-1 million pico projectors sold, but most of these will be LED based. But in 2011-2012, the direct-emission semiconductor laser should be available for projection display applications. Yole therefore forecasts that 10–20% of projectors will be laser-based by 2011 and 50–75% by 2016.

Read more over at Semiconductor Today

Moject is a patented system of interacting with projected content. Basically it's a motion-controlled pico projector system. The idea is that you hold a pico-projector in your hands and use motion control sensors like a Wii remote. They have developed a prototype (based on an iPhone and a laser pico-projector plus a sample game they developed):

One of the nice things about Moject is that it allows you to get image stabilization and location fix. This means that even if you move your hand, the image will stay in the correct horizontal orientation (although you lose some image size of course) and they also know where you project from, so they can fix objects to locations. So if you pan left, and then right again, they'll know you're in the same location - which can be great in games...

The Moject guys have developed and patented the system, and built a prototype (as seen in the video above). They are looking for industry partners to help bring this to market - whether via mobile-phones, handhelds, media players - or anything that integrates a projector, really. Hopefully we'll hear more about them soon...

OK, this a bit silly. But it's also rather cool. Check out this face-tracking eyeball that uses Microvision's Show WX laser projector:

More information on this setup here.

The MPro-150 vs the MPro-120

The MPro-150 looks very much like the MPro-120, and the projector is quite similar. The only difference is that the MPro-150 is brighter (15 lumens vs 12 lumens). I have to say that putting them one against the other, it's hard to notice which one is the brighter one (by the way, the way we perceive lumens of brightness is logarithmic, and the difference between 15 and 12 is small indeed!). In the following photos, the 150 is on top:

You can see that the image of the MPro-120 is more "square", but that's only because I placed them both side by side, and the the MPro-150 is projecting upwards (i.e. not straight).

The MPro-150 vs the AAXA L1 laser projector

Here's a more interesting comparison: how the MPro-150 fares against the AAXA L1 laser projector. Beside being smaller as we've seen before, the L1 is brighter (20 lumens), has a better resolution (800x600). It's a laser projector which means that it's always in focus. It also means that it suffers from Speckle. The L1 costs $599, and here's our review.

Obviously being focus-free is terrific, there's no doubt about that. When we compare images the L1 seems more 'colorful', but it actually it has too much Green color in all images. This is annoying. Personally I prefer the MPro-150 image, especially as I really dislike Speckle. Both projectors has roughly the same image size from the same distance. In the following photo, the L1 is on top (again, please disregard the fact that the image is not square, it's just the way I positioned it):

Next I tested both with the same powerpoint file. The MPro-150 colors are again more true-to-life (the white is white, while on the L1 it's a bit greenish). The fonts are more smooth on the MPro-150 but are a bit more fuzzy, too, which I think has more to do with the viewing software. In fact, the L1 has some serious formatting issues, the spacing between the letters is not even. On the other hand, the MPro-150, for some reason, did not show the photo that is part of the presentation on the top-right. In the following photos, again, the MPro-150 is the bottom image, and please disregard the trapezoid shape of the L1 image:

Here's a movie comparing those two projectors:

Conclusions

To summarize this review:

• The MPro-150 is a great pico-projector, the best of all those we tested so far. Very high build-quality, good image quality and a nice set of features. The internal-memory (and micro-SD) card is a great step forward.
• The menu system is easy to use (even though there's no manual), but playback options are very limited in movies and documents.
• Viewing documents or spreadsheets with small fonts is a problem, and the 640x480 resolution is simply not enough, you just have to zoom-in.

For most people, I really recommend this projector, at least from all those we reviewed (The MPro-120, Ray projector and the AAXA L1). If you do not need the internal memory, then the Ray Projector is smaller and much cheaper. If you have the money, and need to display small fonts and want a really small projector, then go for the L1. You'll get a sharp laser focus-free image but you'll alos get Speckle and over-green images.

back to page 1 of this review

The nice guys over at 3M has sent us their latest pico projector for review, the MPro-150. This is 3M's third pico-projector and it features 640x480 resolution and 15 lumens (brightness). It has 1Gb of built-in memory and a micro-SD slot (it comes with a 2GB card) - from which it can display photos, videos and office documents. It can connect to a RCA, VGA or composite source, and it has two 0.5W speakers and an audio-out. The Mpro-150 is available for $346.