2007 laser based tv to challenge plasma?

It looks like this is more geared towards the RP market and they still have a few issues to resolve. Based on the following comments I would not expect to see this by the end of next year.

http://proav.pubdyn.com/2006_June/Ju...rallaxView.htm


"So it’s all positive, right? Not exactly. The price we pay for the tightly focused coherent light from a laser is speckle, a shifting, grain-like optical interference pattern that’s the signature of a laser light source. If you’ve ever been to a laser light show at a planetarium, or seen laser text and images projected, you know what speckle is and how distracting it can be.


To successfully implement a laser light engine, we’ve got to eliminate as much speckle as possible. It’s even more of a problem with rear-projection TVs, as their screens already have a grain-like micro lens structure that creates optical beat frequencies with the ever-shifting speckle from the laser.


Sure enough, the Mitsubishi demo projector had plenty of speckle, particularly when saturated colors such as green were being shown. Several members of the press standing near me at the demo noticed the combination of grain and speckle and commented on how soft the HD images looked, as well as the unearthly shades of red and green solid colors that were seen.


How do you get rid of speckle? By diffusing the laser’s beam as much as possible. Of course, it’s no longer coherent as a result, which means the light output drops off considerably. (You can’t get something for nothing!)


Back in 1998, I took a trip to Portsmouth, NH, to visit the offices of the Corporation for Optical Laser Research (COLOR), a company that, at the time, had a subsidy from Sony to develop a practical light engine for a cinema-grade projector. The lasers would work in conjunction with a light modulator known as the grating light valve, or GLV. (Remember the GLV?)


I was shown, among other things, a room with a 9- by 12-foot optical bench, loaded with diffusers and mirrors, focusing red, green, and blue laser beams into the combining prism of a Sony XGA-resolution LCD projector. By the time the image got to the screen, it was largely free of speckle, had saturated colors — and wasn’t terribly bright.


Not all that impressive, considering the wall of 6-foot-tall rack units powering and controlling the lasers. (Remember, I said laser illumination for projectors was possible back then, not necessarily practical.) Effectively, the COLOR engineers had created the world’s largest portable LCD projector.


The Mitsubishi line show demo, if nothing else, generated lots of good PR for the company. As to its claim that the product would be at retail by the fourth quarter of 2007, I’d have to be pretty skeptical. Aside from the speckle issue, lasers are considered hazardous because their coherent light can literally cook your retina if you stare directly at them.


That means the laser imaging assembly would have to be completely sealed and accessible only by the factory. Considering the power supply and lasers for the Mitsubishi demo weren’t even inside the ultra-slim 10-inch RPTV cabinet, but located below it in a large black box with numerous cooling fans, there are other packaging issues to be addressed before this product is marketable.


Novalux isn’t the only company showing demonstrations of laser engines. Photonics giant Coherent Inc. recently exhibited at the UDSC-Needham Investment Conference in New York City in March, and had hacked together a laser projection engine for a Samsung 52-inch DLP RPTV. The green laser was a straight diode design, while the red and blue lasers were pumped. It, too, took up the insides of a large support chassis with cooling fans positioned under the TV.


The Coherent/Samsung demo did away with the standard multi-segment color wheel, which also removed the single-chip DLP rainbow artifact I find so distracting. I didn’t see the rainbow during the Mitsubishi demo either, and am guessing it was also using sequential laser color illumination with a fast refresh rate, as its presentation slides illustrated.


One other issue with laser color: Both of these demonstrations talked about the laser’s ability to far exceed the NTSC color gamut. In fact, the green, red, and blue coordinates of lasers at 620, 530, and 460 nanometers create a color space almost equal to the visible color gamut! All fine and dandy, except that the program material being displayed on these TVs is coded into specific color spaces that are much smaller, such as REC 709 and SMPTE-C.


So it doesn’t do any good to exceed the level of green by a magnitude of two or three, nor does it make much sense to push reds into candy-apple territory on such a TV. The smart move is to make sure all of the colors within a specific gamut (and that could include the new DCI cinema color space) are reproduced accurately, something that obviously wasn’t happening during the Mitsubishi demo.


So, is there a laser projection engine in your future? That depends. You’ll probably see LEDs pick up the slack sooner, as short-arc mercury lamps are phased out. It’s true that LEDs aren’t terribly energy-efficient, but they don’t suffer from speckle, and are naturally diffuse illuminants with specific color wavelengths. Four companies showed LED rear-projection TVs at CES 2006, and that’s four times as many that showed a laser product."

This would be a real boon to projection, with DLP the having a bit more to gain than either LCD and Lcos, if it works as advertised. In DLP the laser lets you get rid of the colorwheel, the biggest reliability issue and the largest contributor to RBE. With continuous RGB light it allows a very high refresh rate, it should allow a refresh rate of 10x or greater colorwheel equivalent, as well as higer brightness. Good news for DLP. Increased lifespan, the laser emitters can run at 100% power for 1 million hours before reaching 80% output level. No more $400 bulb changes. Not to mention the DLP will be able to drop in price by a significant amount. The laser assembly is claimed to be 50% cheaper to produce than a lamp assembly, and DLP can drop the colorwheel and it's drive electronics.


More good news for Front Projections in general is twofold. There are several opportunities to improve ambient light rejection in Front projection screens.


1) First is pretty simple, since the laser generates polarized light, a screen with a simple polarizer aligned to the projector's polarized light orientation should reject over 50% or ambient light while reflecting close to 100% of the projected light. My polarizer assumptions may be 180 degrees out, or totally out in left field...


2) In addition, since the laser only lases at a very specific frequency... you can design a screen to reflect light in three very close wavelength windows. The screen will appear black until light of the the appropriate wavelength strikes it. Novalux laser emitts the following; blue (460-nm), green (532-nm) and red (620 to 635-nm), with a spectral width of 1-2 nm. design the screen to reflect blue from 458-462nm (4nm window) and do the same with green and red and you now have deep blacks and vivid projected colors.


Combine 1 and 2 for even deeper blacks...


Will this screen be expensive? YES! Will it produce a fantastic image at 100" when paired with a Laser driven front projector? ABSOLUTELY! Will it cost less than a 104" Plasma? Most definitely...


From reading the Novalux website, the only holdup is a 4 fold increase in Red laser emitter output. They are certain they can reach this milestone and be in production (they have their own small capacity 4 inch GaAs fab that can produce around 10,000 lasers a day) within a year. This is of course contingent on them executing to plan, and achieving both Red laser output and high wafer yields. Since I work in semiconductor myself, I know that doesn't always happen.


Very exciting times ahead for both flat panel and projection TV's


Take a look at Lasers in Projection Page 15 shows drawings comparing colorwheel/UHP DLP projection to Novalux DLP projection.

Displaysearch 2006

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They appear to be looking to replace the light source and path in DMD and 3LCD projection displays, this should be fairly quick to market.

Epson and Novalux

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Novalux display applications

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As with anything, time to market, price and side effects like screen door, rainbows, lumens on screen all affect the possibility of grabbing market share. There is a big difference working and becoming a commercial success; I'm sure this will work, but be successful? Who Knows... Either way, this looks pretty promising in thin RPTV as well as FP. Cool times we live in indeed.

Nothing to see here folks, move on:


"The prototype showed in Sydney is basically a DLP TV with the laser technology replacing the light bulb - only minor tweaks had been done to account for the wider spectrum of the laser.


The DLP or rear projection TVs are big and clunky because the optoelectronics engine that drives them is made of discrete components including a huge high power lamp. The optical chips (used in Laser TV) simply integrate all those separate components together into a chip, and that takes out the manual labor, cost and bulk.


The laser doesn't make the TV any higher resolution, it’s main benefit are that it delivers twice as much colour as a plasma or LCD TV. The Laser TV gives you almost the full color spectrum that you see in real life, and the contrast in things like fleshtones, deep blues & reds, and also rich yellows really jump out at you because you've never seen them before on a TV. That's why it looks better and brighter than plasma or LCD. It’s twice the colour that gives the real life rich content experience.


Laser TVs won’t come onto the market for at least another year, if not slipping into 2008, and will initially be best suited for larger displays of 50- to 60-inches and up ... If the room you want to put your TV in isn’t large enough to fit a 50- or 60-inch screen comfortably, a Laser TV or any other TV at that size won’t be on your shopping list."

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Perhaps I am misunderstanding but Arasor provides only a component part of the Novalux developed laser.


Novalux is a US based company and reading this PR, they showed a demo unit at CES 2006.

http://www.novalux.com/company/press.php?release=5

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Can you post a link to that article,I could not turn anything up.


FWIW-a CNET article with more details....

http://cnet.com.au/tvs/0,239035250,339271573,00.htm