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LCD Projections Projection displays look to hang in new niches By David Lieberman, EE Times New York -- Today's biggest market for LCD-based electronic projectors is corporate presentations, but tomorrow's market will be really big: the rear-projection TV. Until that tomorrow arrives, a number of applications are emerging in which LCD projectors will carve out a niche. According to one startup specializing in LCD rear projectors, Clarity Visual Systems Inc. (Wilsonville, Ore.), the opportunities for rear projectors in "dynamic signage" cut across entertainment, business and retail-market applications. Clarity and others have visions of big displays going into many different venues. With diagonals of 40 or 50 inches, and sometimes "tiled" together to form even bigger displays, projection display "cubes" will be installed in department stores, according to big-display boosters, to present images of models showing off the latest fashions; at kiosks in airports to pace us visually through the room selection at nearby hotels, and at neighborhood theaters to dish up short clips of the movies currently playing. One of the first installations of a video wall of tiled Clarity displays, though, is not in such leading-edge applications, but in a market segment that's been an early adopter of advanced displays, both on desktops and on trading-room walls: the financial community. Clarity concluded an OEM agreement in the spring with video wall specialist Imtech Corp. (Denville, N.J.), whose previous installations--nearly 1,000 of them--have used CRT-based rear projectors from Pioneer and Sony. These include what Imtech claims is "the world's most sophisticated digital financial information display," the 100-CRT, 55-foot-long, 11-foot-high display system at the Nasdaq stock market. Imtech will be using Clarity's 40-inch VideoBanner and 52-inch VideoWall LCD projection displays in future installations, starting with a matrix of 52-inchers (four across, two high) on the Global Foreign Exchange trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston (New York). But why use projection cubes based on LCDs instead of conventional projection CRTs? "Frankly, for the form factor," he said. Clarity's cubes "range in depth from 18 to 28 inches," said Paul Noble, founder and chief executive of Imtech, "and so require only half the floor space of other cubes. Many businesses have considered the addition of a video wall in conference rooms, trading rooms or lobbies, but have decided against it because of a lack of floor space." (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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