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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/06/pico_projectors_at_computex/

Pocket DV cam packs pico projector

We've seen the future, and it's tiny

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Media, 6th June 2009 00:08 GMT

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Computex Tiny pico projectors provided some of the biggest buzz at this week's Computex mega-show in Taiwan, according to a report [1] from that country's tech-news source, DigiTimes.

In addition to powering pocketable projectors, pico-projection mechanisms and their optics are tiny enough to be incorporated into devices such as cell phones, media players, and cameras.

In fact, a pico-projector-DV-cam mash-up was on display at Comuputex, created by Taiwan's Life Technologies and to be marketed under their DigiLife [2] brand.

The camera half of the DigiLife DDV-JF1, scheduled to be released by the end of this year, will have a 5-megapixel CMOS sensor that can capture 1280-by-720 resolution images at 30 frames per second, compress them using the H.264 codec, and play them back on its 2.5-inch LCD display.

But the surprise inside the DDV-JF1 will be a built-in pico projector designed to project 640-by-360 images up to four meters away at a diagonal image size of 50 inches.

Life Technologies hasn't yet decided which pico-projector technology it will use in the the DDV-JF1. As of today, it has four main choices: Texas Instruments' DLP [3], 3M's LCOS [4] (liquid crystal on silicon), and Displaytech's FLCOS [5] (ferroelectric LCOS) systems, which each require a focusing lens; and the lensless laser-based system [6] designed by Microvision and planned for both OEM customers and the company's own Show WX [7], which is scheduled for release later this year.

DV cam manufacturer Aiptek [8], also headquartered in Taiwan, is also planning a cam-cum-pico unit for release before year's end. The company wasn't showing that combo at Computex, but it did have a passle of its own pico projectors on display, including the T20 [9], designed for use with notebooks, and the T30 [10], for projecting video from an iPhone or iPod.

Also on display was Aiptek's upgrade of its award-winning PocketCinema V10 [11], the V10Plus, which adds more memory and the ability to record from, as the company claims, "any video source."

The PocketCinema V10's aforementioned award - one of the Taiwan Excellence Awards [12] announced last month - was topped by another pico. Optoma's Pico Pocket Projector PK101 [13] won a Taiwan Excellence Gold Award, while Aiptek took home a Silver.

According to DigiTimes, Oculon Optoelectronics [14], BroVista International [15], Honlai Technology [16], and ebon Technology [17] all had 3M LCOS pico projectors on display at this year's Computex.

The next big thing may be quite small, indeed. ®