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2010 SID and Projection Summit
By Karl Guttag, Syndiant CTO    June 29, 2010
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　The last month was very busy for Syndiant, presenting and exhibiting at both SID and Projection Summit.  At SID, our CEO Mark Harward presented at the DisplaySearch Business conference and the Cowen & Co. Investors Forum, while I presented an invited paper at SID Symposium titled “High Resolution Microdisplays for Pico-Projectors.”   At Projection Summit I presented “Why Resolution Matters.”  
　As you can tell from the title of my papers, I’m a big believer that pico projectors are going to have ever higher resolution.  In the not too distant future we will be seeing 720P and eventually 1080P resolutions in pico projectors.  Here at Syndiant we are hard at work on our HD generation of products that we expect to sample this year and go into volume projection in 2011.   I plan to write more on HD in future blogs.   
　While Mark and I received a lot of positive comments about our presentations, the big hit for Syndiant at both conferences had to be our Six-Way Pico Projector Technology Comparison.   From some media reports that came out before the show, particularly by Insight Media and PicoProjector-Info.com, we had a number of people seeking us out.   In the pre-show reports, we released a photograph showing we were driving all the projectors - including those that supported WVGA (848x480) - with an SVGA (800x600) source, but at both SID and Projection Summit we connected a second computer that output native WVGA for the two WVGA projectors in the comparison.  Additionally, we had some competitors come by and we let them verify that the projectors using their devices were in the high brightness and best color modes.  
　Below is picture I took of the setup at Projection Summit.  If you click on the picture below it will take you to a higher resolution version that will let you see more detail.   The technology used in each projector is labeled either above or below the projected image.  There are no “Photoshop Effects” used to make any of the projectors look better or worse (the image was straightened and cropped from an 18 megapixel original).  I did read an on-line comment by someone who had seen the pre-SID picture that Syndiant’s image looked “too good” and must have been “Photoshopped.”  This gave me an idea for a marketing slogan, “Image quality so good, you will swear it was Photoshopped.”

　Syndiant’s pico projector technology comparison had a mix of image content from personal to business applications so people could see the differences in the technologies in various applications.  Shown above or below each projected image are the approximate electrical power consumption and light output. 　Syndiant is an LCOS microdisplay manufacturer and the purpose of this comparison was to show the differences in the various technologies inside the projectors and not the projectors themselves.    The projectors represent the most common technologies that are used inside pico projectors today. 　All the projectors selected are within about 20% of the same power consumption (about 4 to 5 Watts for the whole system)  and the distance of the projector to the screen were adjusted so that the areas of the various projected images are about the same.   This allowed people to have an idea as to the efficiency and brightness of the various technologies.
　The display technologies in the projectors are (top row left to right and bottom row left to right in the picture above):
　　1. DLP® WVGA - The new 848x480 DLP® based projector.  Interestingly, the WVGA DLP uses a “diamond” pixel arrangement that causes a number of artifacts including “sharpening halos” and diamond jaggies (particularly noticeable in text) and requires scaling which causes lower effective resolution (see the “Resolution Chart Close-ups” below).
　　2. Syndiant’s SYL2041 – Our projector used the same LED and optical engine as the 640x480 FLCOS projector directly below it, but we replaced the FLCOS device with our VueG8 microdisplay.  Syndiant’s VueG8-LCOS is able to demonstrate about a 1.4X improvement in the lumens per Watt and a 1.56x improvement in resolution over the FLCOS device it replaced.  The SYL2041 has 1.18X more pixels than the WVGA-DLP and laser beam scanning projectors.  

　　3. DLP® HVGA – This is demonstrating the DLP at 480x320 with a roughly 7.6 micron “square” pixels.  This projector gave a graphic demonstration of why resolution is important as this projector has about 1/3rd the pixels of the SYL2041.  While a newer nHD (640 x 360 pixels) DLP has been announced (but was not available), it will only increase the resolution 1.5X still leaving less than half the pixels of the SYL2041 and less than a quarter the pixels the HD resolutions that Syndiant will be sampling later in 2010.

　　4. Laser Beam Scanning (LBS) – This technology uses 3 fast switching lasers beams and a scanning/steering mirror to direct the beams.  The image quality issues people may notice include speckle (noise) particularly in bright/white area, image distortion (“bow tie effect”), flicker/flashing lines (particularly on the outside of the image).   It was also a surprise to many people how much power the LBS consumes and how hot it gets with less light output than the LED based technologies.  LBS scanning is likely to be the most expensive of the technologies shown due to the comparatively high cost of fast switching lasers as well as and the electronics to control the beam scanning mirror and the lasers.

　　5. FLCOS - The 640x480 (VGA) Ferroelectric LCOS (FLCOS) was the first color sequential LCOS pico projector on the market.  Using the same LEDs and roughly the same power and optics as this FLCOS projector, Syndiant’s SYL2041 delivers about 1.4X the lumens per Watt using the same optics and 1.56X more pixels in the same space.

　　6. Color Filter LCOS (CF-LCOS) – This 640X480 (VGA) projector demonstrates some of the color issues with Color Filter LCOS. Most of the earliest so called “LCOS pico projectors” used this technology which had comparatively poor color due to blending between the adjacent color filtered sub-pixels.  Unfortunately this has caused some people to associate “LCOS” with “poor color.”   This technology comparison will let people see that Syndiant’s LCOS technology has well saturated colors.
　Resolution Chart Close Ups Shown below are close-up pictures of a resolution chart from Syndiant SYL2041, the DLP® WVGA with Diamond pixels and the Laser Beam Scanning projector that I think dramatically shows the difference between claimed and effective resolution. We drove all three projectors with their claimed native resolution. 　The SYL2041 has no problems with either horizontal or vertical 1 pixel wide lines.   The lines are equally well resolved in either direction.  The image is clean with no noise or jaggy artifacts.  Not only does the SYL2041 have nearly 20% more pixels, it has “better pixels” as the side by side comparison demonstrates.
　The Diamond Pixel DLP is clearly doing different processing horizontally and vertically to convert the “diamond” pixels to square pixels.  The processing tends to blur the 1 pixel wide vertical lines together while the horizontal lines have severe jaggy artifacts that are different for every line.  Also note on the top of the image where a group of 4 horizontal and 4 vertical lines cross, the processing results in back dots where they should be white.
　The Laser Beam Scanning projector demonstrated much lower resolution on horizontal lines than vertical lines.  As can be seen in the picture, the vertical lines tend to blur together.   Additionally there is a color moiré pattern in the vertical lines as well as some pretty severe speckle/noise in the image.

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