InfoComm 2006 Best Buzz Awards

Most Novel Display

We found the most novel display in the Barco booth. Developed by Global Imagination (Los Gatos, CA; www.globalimagination.com), the company showed how a Barco projector can be used to illuminate a globe from the inside. The effect is an illuminated sphere that is perfect for displaying images of the Earth or other spherical data. The demo shows how users can better view weather patterns on a global basis while walking around the spherical display system. Another application is demonstrating to senior management how satellites track around the globe. We even saw some vacation destination footage with a 360-degree view that can be seen from all angles by walking around the spherical display. It has just received its first order for 50 units for a school system in the UK. We love this thing! The company says it can make spherical displays from 6 inches to 6 feet in diameter and uses a projector with a variable surface fisheye lens to project the image, with additional geometric correction added. The screen is made of acrylic with a diffuser surface.

Global Imagination, Mike Foody, 408 866 6800, info@globalimagination.com

Best Wireless Demo

Transmission of wireless high quality video - even SD video, has been elusive at reasonable price points. But much progress was made this year by Amimon (Herzlia, Israel; www.amimon.com) with its demonstration of transmission of wireless HD content to a projector in the Sanyo booth. In the demonstration, a pair of rather large wireless send/receive boxes reside between the HD DVD player and a Sanyo projector. The wireless link is powered by Amimon's WHDI (Wireless High-Definition Interface) technology, providing video quality equivalent to that achieved with wired interfaces such as HDMI. The demo enabled the delivery of uncompressed 720p content from the HD DVD player to the projector. We took a careful look at the image quality and could find no obvious problems as the data is flowing at an equivalent data rate of 1.3Gbps. Amimon expects to ship its WGDI chip set to customers in early 2007. The chip set can support transmission of video at up to 3Gbps, which is good enough for 1080p content (think Blu-ray). Latency is a low 1ms and the company has already demonstrated transmission of video for over 100 feet through walls. Good news.

Amimon, Noam Geri, [972] 9-962-9222, Contact@amimon.com

Best Picture Quality

Talk about black levels - Texas Instruments set a new benchmark with its technology demo at InfoComm. Sequestered in a darkened room, TI showed film footage from it latest home theater projection prototype that reached an astounding 20,000:1 contrast ratio. When the film went to black, the screen went to black - no slight glow on the screen - real black. TI accomplished this feat by modifying a projection design unit, replacing the adjustable iris with a dynamic iris that modulates light to the DMD based on the content of the video. The result is a prototype that varies the light output from 1000 lumens and 20,000:1 contrast to 3000 lumens and 8800:1 contrast and includes the BrilliantColor technology. Dynamic Black is one of the next areas of focus for TI, so expect to see products reaching this level of contrast within a year or so. Awesome.

Texas Instruments, Molly Mulloy, 214-567-3125, mollym@ti.com

Best Interactive Projection Displays

Interaction with a projected image is not new, but GestureTek (Toronto, Canada; www.gesturetek.com) took it to a new level at InfoComm. In its booth, we saw several interactive display systems that we, and many others, found to be lots of fun. For example, one display featured a white mat on the floor with a downward projected image. This showed kiosk-type information about products with more information accessed by standing on the item of interest. Another demo featured a green screen where attendees could place themselves in the middle of an animated game. A third featured a rear-projection coffee table with an interactive game and touch screen. A fourth display featured a glass projection screen that users can interact with by hand movement or by touch. Good stuff.

GestureTek, Jennifer Young, 416-340-9290, Jennifer.young@gesturetek.com

Best LED Display

There were lots of LED walls on display at InfoComm, but the one that caught our eye was from Keyframe, a division of Daktronics (Brookings, SD; www.daktronics.com). The image quality was so good we did a double take. Using 8x8-inch modules with a 4mm pitch between LED pixels, Daktronics created a 16x9.5-foot LED wall, which it flew high above its booth. This created a 25-foot HD image with 1296 x 720 pixels that was head and shoulders above everything else we saw. This is only an indoor display and does it ever suck the juice. This baby needs about 90 amps at 220V of three-phase power. That's a heck of an electric bill, but the image is great.

Keyframe, Brent Joffer, 605-697-4592, bjoffer@daktronics.com

Best New Enabling Technology

Most new product categories are enabled by innovative component technology, which is why we choose the Ujoy lamp from Philips Lighting (Turnhout, Belgium; www.uhp.philips.com). This new 50W lamp is smalland compact and sheds the bulky cage assembly used today on all projection products. This makes for easy end-user replacement and lower cost. Philips, along with partners Texas Instruments and Sypro Optics, think this lamp will help enable a whole new class of consumer personal projection products designed for watching DVDs, gaming and image sharing - all at price points below $500. This is the bold new frontier for projection and it will require a whole new way of designing, developing and selling these products, but we applaud this effort to take advantage of this market. Release the hounds! -CC

Philips Lighting, Gaopeng Sun, +[32] 14 407 614, gaopeng.sun@philips.com

Best Technology Reuse

For years, 3M (St. Paul, MN; www.mmm.com) has had a black beaded screen technology that was too expensive to find a home in consumer MDTVs, but has found some traction as a rear-projection screen in video walls. Now, in a clever reuse of this technology, this Vikuiti screen technology is being marketed to the digital signage community - but with a twist. 3M has taken the basic black bead film and added an adhesive layer to it. End users can now buy a sheet of this material and use ordinary scissors and water to cut out creative shapes that can be applied to clear acrylic sheets and illuminated by a projector from behind the sign. The result is video or messaging to displays on beautifully handcrafted canvas, providing a unique and inventive display system. 3M has a great portfolio of products and technologies, but has not always done a great job of commercializing them. We applaud 3M's creative thinking in reusing this niche technology in a potentially bigger market.

3M, Sally Davidson, (513) 753-2045, sadavidson@mmm.com

Best Autostereoscopic 3D Display

Autostereoscopic 3D displays require no glasses and ideally, should create a compelling, easy-to-view image with no eyestrain, nausea, confined viewing zones, etc. In the Sharp booth we found a very nice autostereoscopic 3D display developed by a partner, Digital Picture Group 3D (Beverly Hills, CA; www.digitalpicturegroup.com). The demo featured a 45-inch LCD panel, supplied by Sharp that was modified by adding a lenticular sheet to create a 3D image. Digital Picture Group is targeting the display for attention-grabbing signage applications. But, in addition to selling the 3D display, the company employs a staff of graphic designers and software engineers who edit 2D content to enhance the images for best effect on its 3D display. It certainly was grabbing attention in the Sharp booth as attendees who came to see the latest big screen LCD TV suddenly found themselves captivated by the 3D display. So did we.

Digital Picture Group, Brad Bent, (310) 741-2013, bent@dpg3d.com

Mine is Bigger Than Yours

Bragging rights in the "Mine is Bigger Than Yours" category goes to Barco (Kuurne, Belgium; www.barco.com). At InfoComm, the company unveiled three new 3-chip DLP projectors, with one -- the XLM HD30 -- offering an industry high 30,000 lumens of brightness at the center of the image. Delivering native 2048 x 1080 resolution (DC2K) and featuring a fully sealed DMD engine, the XLM HD30 is built to work around the clock, making it ideal for use in the demanding rental & staging and large events markets. But you'd better get the whole stage crew to jockey this baby around -- we heard one attendee in the Barco booth say, "It is nearly the size of a coffin!"

Barco, Joanne Grigg, +44 1189 290 105, joanne.grigg@barco.com

Best Large Venue Display

InfoComm used to have its famous Shoot-Out with dozens of projectors displaying the same images for comparison. But quality improved and the differences became minor, so the Shoot-Out was discontinued. What continued was the Large Venue Display Gallery - a much smaller demonstration (organizers resist using the term Shoot-Out) among the best projectors on the market. This year, Barco, Christie and Digital Projection all fielded 3-chip DLP systems with resolutions ranging from 1400 x 1050 to 2048 x 1080. These are all very nice projectors, but the hands-down winner in terms of image quality was the SRX R110 - a 10K lumen projector with a whopping 4096 x 2160 resolution from Sony Electronics (Park Ridge, NJ; www.sony.com).(Sony stacked two of them for the demo). We had to get about 6 feet away to see any pixels and even at this distance the image was relatively sharp. The same cannot be said for the other three. Granted, no one is going to sit this close to a 50-foot wide screen, but even from more normal viewing distances the crispness of the image was noticeable. Sony says it has sold 130 of the SRX projectors so far and plans an 18K lumen model for next year. Go Sony!

Sony Electronics, Tom DiNome, 201 930-6357, tom.dinome@am.sony.com

Best New Screen Technology

Last year we gave DNP (Karlslunde, Denmark; www.dnp.dk) a Best Buzz award for their Supernova screen technology - an ambient light absorbing screen that offers significantly improved contrast in high ambient light environments. This year, we need to buzz them again for advancing the technology from a hard surface screen to a flexible, roll-up screen. Suspended by thin wires, the Supernova Flex Screen provides a very stylish design with a fast, low noise motor - and, of course, a light-rejecting film that markedly improves contrast. DNP will offer the Flex Screen in 4:3, 16:9 and cinemascope formats in sizes up to 150 inches. And by the way, this is not a polarization dependent screen, so it is compatible with any projector technology.

DNP, Jacob Christensen, [45] 46 16 51 54, jch@dnp.dk

About Insight Media

Insight Media (www.insightmedia.info) provides a full array of market research, news, analysis and consulting services for the microdisplay industry, with special attention to projection and near-to-eye products. Tracking the complete supply chain from finished products and distribution to components, microdisplay-based products, technologies, trends and analysis is delivered through newsletters, technology reports, forecasts, conferences and custom consulting activities. Insight Media has developed a world-class team of industry analysts and associates to provide the most comprehensive coverage and analysis of the microdisplay industry has to offer.

To be removed from the Insight Media News list, please click here.