The Hindu Business Line : Projecting the big picture

With at least two compelling technologies to choose from, and applications stretching from professional presentation to home cinema, customers call the shots in the burgeoning business of digital projectors. Anand Parthasarathy reads the message on the walls of darkened boardroom and bedroom.

Pint-sized projection: Explay’s Nano projector is embedded in the mobile phone.

There is an aspect of the ongoing phenomenon of digital convergence that goes beyond the ‘sangamam’ of computer, communication and Internet technology streams. It is the subsurface confluence of hitherto separate consumer and corporate needs. And nowhere is this more palpable than in the seemingly boring arena of multimedia projectors — those ungainly pieces of optical and electrical hardware that corporates and educational institutions can’t seem t o do without.

After epidiascopes died of old age and slide projectors ceased to make sense once 35 mm slide shows went out of fashion, the Over Head Projector or OHP soldiered on — the mainstay of student, teacher and corporate honchos who needed to make a quick presentation illustrated with text and graphics. It was a pain — and a costly one at that — considering the hassle of obtaining OHP ‘flimsies’, then writing on them with special marker pens.

Powerpoint killed the OHP — or transformed it into one of technology’s walking wounded. Twenty years old this week (see box: 20 years of powering presentations), the PC-based presentation tool we all love to hate transformed our projection slides into a rich masala mix of colour, text and picture that wowed as many viewers as they infuriated.

Replacing pens or plastic, with a mouse and a keyboard, Powerpoint made a generational change in the quality of presentations — but it had one downside: It required a new and pricey PC peripheral, a projector whose asking price was ten times that of the humble OHP. Early models were huge ‘3-gun’ monsters but these soon gave way to more compact table-top models which, nevertheless, cost upwards of Rs 1 lakh each… creating, in India at least, a new and thriving business of projector hire by the hour.

Improved optics also made for much brighter pictures — and one was no longer required to draw the curtains in a room to view a presentation — which, thanks to the improvements made to the product, could include a variety of sound and video clips.

It was inevitable that projectors that could show movie clips would soon be able to project entire movies. That was when the twin worlds of corporate data projectors and consumer home movie products came together in a lucrative new win-all stream that is the digital projector business today. It has all happened after the turn of the century — driven by the ubiquity of the Digital Versatile Desk or DVD as a convenient medium to sell movies in the mass market.

Yet divergent pulls remain.

Corporate customers, for whom powerpoint (or its Open Source challenger) and increasingly Adobe’s Flash animation were still the core tools for business presentations, demanded smaller, lighter, projectors which they could lug to meetings along with their laptops…. They needed just enough lumens to ‘light up’ a sales pitch and they were not looking for pristine quality in the image.

Emerging home users, on the other hand, who were drawn by the affordability of DVD movies to set up their own home theatres, were itching to go beyond the size limitations of their TV screens and get the ‘big picture’ right there on their bed room or drawing room wall.

They demanded a quality of picture that was expected to match the theatrical experience — and with the recent advent of high-definition formats, to even exceed current theatre screen standards. For them size and weight is not an issue — luminosity and pixel resolution is.

To reconcile these different wish lists, the projector industry is currently divided between two competing technologies, for the internal mechanisms that are used to compose the image: LCD or liquid crystal display and DLP or Digital Light Processor. Both have some unique advantages and a downside or two.

LCD is generally known to produce more saturated colours and a sharper image but this can sometimes be a disadvantage since pixelation can be a little more obvious, especially if you view the image from up close. It can produce what is known as ‘screen door’ effect, as if one is seeing the picture through a wire mesh screen

DLP, on the other hand, provides better contrast and better blacks. But it is known to display a ‘rainbow’ effect because of the colour wheel that forms part of the design.

Technology improves so rapidly these days that both approaches have seen marked improvements — and both LCD and DLP have closed the gap with the perceived downside of their respective technologies. Most consumers will be hard put to tell the difference, particularly with the typical quality of the movie medium being used. (see box: Twin Projector technologies)

The major projector makers are divided between the two camps — while some such as Toshiba have offerings in both rival technologies.

Epson’s most recent offerings in India have been the EMP-S5 and the EMP –X5, multimedia projectors aimed at the corporate and class room market. Both are 3-LCD system portables (that is 2.6-2.7 kg in weight).

The S5, as its name indicates, has resolution equivalent to SVGA or Super Video Graphics Array that is 800 by 600 resolution or a total of 480,000 pixels (Rs 45,100); while the X5 is an XGA or eXtended Graphics Array system (1024 by 768 or 786,000 pixels) and costs Rs 61,400. The company claims to be world’s leading brand in the data projector arena.

Texas being a chip maker has no direct presence in the equipment end of the business.

The DLP pops up in multiple makes — Acer, Mitsubishi, Viewsonic, Panasonic. In India, Acer was recently judged to be the biggest seller in the ultra-portable sector, by independent, Singapore-based analysts, Fisher Consulting.

All these models are less than 2.5 kg and are priced in the Rs 40,000 to Rs 1.6 lakh range. The true bantam weight is Acer’s PD 311, which weighs just 1.3 kg and is being offered in India for Rs 75,000.

Even XGA may seem passé — once more geographies change over to high-definition television standards which boost the resolution to 1920 by 1080 ( generally known as ‘1080’ using the number of vertical lines of resolution).

This is as far as home/office projectors have gone…… though theatre systems have had to move to 2K and 4K, that is, horizontal resolutions of 2048 and 4096, to give customers something better than what they can achieve with home projectors.

Acer’s micro portable PD 311, recently launched in India.

Size-wise, the projector industry has managed to squeeze the key electronics of the projector and integrate it on a chip — so that projectors can be ‘pica’ sized.

Epson has done this with its 3-LCD technology, borrowing the lamp technology from Philips to create projectors small enough to go into cameras and other hand-held devices.

And Texas Instruments recently unveiled a protyotype ‘pico projector’ small enough to fit on your finger tips. Meanwhile, the Israeli Explay and the US-based Microvision have both unveiled pint sized projectors that can be incorporated in a variety of hand-held devices.

A Korean handset maker has already launched a mobile phone that incorporates a projector and before the year is out one should see such phone-projector combos from multiple handset makers worldwide.

Viewing rich video through an XGA or High Definition projector in the comfort of one’s home is one end of today’s exciting spectrum of visual experiences.

Projecting news clips or live cricket coverage of barely passable quality, through one’s mobile phone, to make a 30 inch TV-sized picture on the wall of one’s hotel room is the other extreme of applications.

Both have their customers, clamouring for more of the same — and the projector industry will have its work cut out in the coming months, conjuring up the big picture for an increasingly bigger chunk of the market for the moving image.

Twin projector technologies

How the two competing processes work.

LCD or Liquid Crystal Display projectors use special mirrors to break the white light from the lamp into red, green and blue components. They pass through three liquid crystal glass panels, about the size of a postage stamp one each for the colour components of the signal. As light passes through, individual pixels are opened or closed to allow light to pass or to block it. This acts as a modulator whose output is fed to a prism which combines light passing through the three coloured panels, into a single image. Enlarged, by passing through a lens, it is projected on the screen. This 3-LCD technology is attributed to Epson which seeks to distance it from numerous single LCD technologies on offer.

DLP or Digital Light Processor is proprietary technology from Texas Instruments. White light is passed through a coloured wheel filter that causes red, green and blue components to be shown sequentially on the DLP chip, an optical semiconductor, invented in 1987 by Larry Hornbeck. This is a sophisticated light switch consisting of nearly 2 million microscopically small hinged mirrors. Depending on the light signal data streaming in, some of the mirrors are ordered to tilt one way (on) or another (off), creating light or dark patches … in over a thousand shades of gray alone. The sequence of colours flowing from the DLP chip passes through the projector lens and the human eye integrates the flow of colour and interprets it as an image.

DLP can work with a single chip — but the more advanced systems use three chips — one each for the red, green and blue streams…. Just like the 3-LCD system, when you come to think of it!

20 years of powering that presentation

On July 31, 1987, the New York Times carried a brief news item that reported on ‘the first significant acquisition, today, of the Microsoft Corporation’ — $14 million for the Sunnyvale, California-based Forethought Inc.

What Microsoft got with the buy was Forethought’s flagship product, a programme called Powerpoint, that was already being used by Apple Macintosh users to create overhead projector transparencies.

Powerpoint had been developed only a few months earlier by Bob Gaskins, a Ph.D student at the University of California at Berkeley, with a software engineer, Dennis Austin. They initially called their brain child ‘Presenter’ — and it was aimed at mixing text and graphics to create projection slides.

By 1990, Microsoft had improved on Powerpoint, converted it into a colour product and integrated it into the Office suite.

It could now be saved as a software file and directly fed to a projector, rather than being used to create transparencies. The tool that has become the de facto standard for presentation was born… and with it a whole generation of jokes and quips about Microsoft’s grip on the way every one communicated at meetings and conferences. ‘Power corrupts, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely!’ was one of the milder ones. Mostly they hid a secret envy at the beauty of a product that could unleash the creative skills of the rest of us dummies — and allow us to make colourful, if so often kitschy, presentations to our peers.

Powerpoint in a sense could be said to be the software engine that kick-started the entire projector industry and by sheer numbers forced the market to create models that today are well below the half a lakh of rupees mark.

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Projecting the big picture