The future of digital projection will be built on laser illumination technology. Lasers present the culmination in solid-state lighting and will surpass LEDs (and lamps) as the fundamental light-source building blocks in projectors. In order to efficiently capture the power of these lasers, other components within the projector will need to be rethought, particularly the microdisplay. While Texas’ Instruments DLP technology has dominated the microdisplay market for many years, lasers present an opportunity for other microdisplay technologies to capture potential applications that DLP cannot efficiently scale to. Many of these new laser microdisplay technology involve steering a laser across the screen similar to the nearly-extinct CRT technology. Alces’, however, takes the middle-road, rather than creating a full 2D image from an array of mirrors like the DLP or raster scanning a single laser beam, the Alces display system uses a 1D micro-ribbon array and 1D scanner to paint columns of pixels across the screen. This enables this technology to efficiently couple with lasers light sources, unlike the 2D panel technologies, and scale to much higher resolutions than single laser-beam steering systems.
The image above shows Alces benchtop monochrome laser projection system displaying a 4K-wide image.
