January PM Released

First of all - Happy New Year. We wish you success in all your business and personal endeavors.

As we write this monthly update, we - and many of you, are preparing to go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This show promises to be bigger and better than ever with lots of cool technology with a few surprises too, most likely. CE products remain a very hot category and TV technology will be on the top of most of your to-do lists.

While the excitement is palpable, we are also a bit apprehensive this year. There will lots of projection, LCD and PDP-TV sold this year and just about everyone will demand a piece of the pie. The apprehension is for the profitability of the industry. There is so much product push and fierce price erosion that manufacturers have got to be worried. They will build the TVs, but will enough consumers buy them - or worse, will they wait for the prices to keep dropping.

Take a look at some of the financial results of the big LCD makers. Unit shipments are up, but revenues are not keeping pace. These boom and bust cycles are gut wrenching for the industry. It has led to consolidation of players and will lead to more in the future. And the stakes for success are rising with each new fab. You are also now starting to see law suites to stop competitors from selling products in particular countries, while others are starting to enforce their IP. It has been a time where there was enough growth to float all boats, but that is changing. It's a Darwinian world out there.

So on that upbeat note, we will be at CES looking for all the news and reporting on some of the back room technology demonstrations as well. Insight Media's founder and Sr. Editor Chris Chinnock will also be speaking at the CES Co-Conference, Enabling Technology Forum being held during CES in Las Vegas. The topic will cover illumination technology for projection systems and will provide an update on the current lamp technology supply/demand situation while highlighting some of the newer technologies that are now ready to come to market. This includes Xenon, RF excited, LED and laser sources.

In the just-released January 2005 edition of Projection Monthly, we thought we would highlight coverage from the International Display Workshop (IDW) held at the Nigata Convention center in Japan, December 8-10. Our special correspondent-long time industry expert Mary Lou Jepsen filed seven reports from the workshop.

For example, she discovered a 34-inch LED backlit RPTV from Nittoh Kogaku, an optical component and lens manufacturer exploring entrance into the manufacture of optical engines. The demonstration was based on a 3-LCOS panel engine with an undisclosed number of LEDs serving as the light source. While the brightness was not stated by Nitto Kogaku, our gross assessment was somewhere between 100 and 200 nits screen brightness. The image was not crisp reflecting the prototype nature of this demonstration and the fact that some improvements on the projection lens are likely needed.

A paper from Sony did a good job of explaining the benefits of LED illumination - in their case for 40- and 46-inch Qualia 005 LCD-TVs. Sony is able to use the LEDs to create an extended color space, sYCC, which is already widely used in printing digital camera images. Using a backlight based on Lumileds LEDs, Sony achieved this colorspace, which corresponds to a gamut 105% wider than NTSC. Nice.

We also report on the technical details of the next-generation, high-efficiency wire grid polarizing beam splitter (PBS) from Moxtek. These improvements boost PBS performance in the green and blue regions, where previous designs had been a little weak. To do this, Moxtek added a three-layer undercoating to improve transmission of the P-polarized light. For the reflected S-polarized light, Moxtek added a three-layer film coating on top of the wires that constitute the wire grid polarizer. Each three-layer film is composed of varying refractive indices, using a Low/High/Low structure corresponding to dielectric anti-reflection design. In double-pass PBS configuration, the net efficiency was improved from 78% in the green to 84%. The team at Moxtek hinted at even greater efficiencies possible through improvements yet to be revealed. We'll keep you posted on developments as they unfold.

Tokyo based Ricoh Co. Ltd. presented an update on a pixel-shift projection system under development at the company. These systems use LCOS panels and "wobulation" to deliver 4X the native LCOS panel resolution: in this case, 2048 x 1526. In the Ricoh solution, the resolution is achieved temporally: four different temporal "resolution" fields constitute each frame. The pixel-shift device includes a stack of two Vertically Aligned Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal (VA-FLC) devices with a static retarder sandwiched in between for polarization rotation. The optical shift distance of the pixel is a function of the voltage applied to the VA-FLC device. Is a commercial product coming? No decision on that yet, apparently.

Seiko Epson also revealed how it does its auto keystone correction for front projectors, currently implemented in the Epson Powerlight 835P/830. The trick is to use a CCD camera mounted right next to the projection lens. Clever.

In another Sony paper, the company revealed another secret about its Qualia 004, SXRD projector. To get high system contrast for the 3-PBS architecture, it uses slightly off-axis illumination into each PBS. This is augmented with a variable aperture iris to increase the dynamic range of the microdisplay on a scene-by-scene basis. The projector uses three SXRD panels with 1920 x 1080 resolution and achieves a 2000:1 on-screen contrast ratio. 12-bit signal processing helps provide a very linear grayscale for 3D gamma correction at seven levels and shading correction. It even has a fast response speed of 5ms.

This is just a snap shot of some of the news that we report on in the current edition of Projection Monthly. You'll find this coverage and much more including one hundred forty plus timely stories on Microdisplay Technology, Product, Market, Business and Channel News for Projection Components and All Large Area Display Systems, all organized into over thirty sub-sections for easy review and reference.

Projection Monthly is a subscription-based newsletter that covers the entire big-screen display industry including all technologies, markets and applications - from supply chain through the distribution channel. If you would like to evaluate a sample copy of Projection Monthly, please contact: Dave Torromeo at dave@insightmedia.info or call him at 203-831-8464

And for you subscribers, don't forget the index and search possibilities with your back issues of Projection Monthly and Microdisplay Report. You can readily create a comprehensive data archive on the Microdisplay Industry. Simply place all your Insight Media PDF files in a single folder and put your Adobe Acrobat Reader (v.6.0) in search mode, pointing to that folder. Voila, any and all search hits appear and can be sorted by date or four other ways.

About Insight Media
Insight Media (www.insightmedia.info) is a full-service market research company specializing in microdisplay-based products in the projection and near-to-eye segments. It tracks the full supply chain, finished products and distribution of these microdisplay-based products through its various newsletters, technology reports, forecasts, conferences and custom consulting activities. Headquartered in Norwalk, CT, Insight Media has a core of 8 analysts and associates to cover the microdisplay industry in a comprehensive manner.