Mobile Phone Projectors "Will Launch This Year"

An anonymous reader writes "Mobile phones with built-in mini projectors will launch later this year, according to 3M, which gave PC Pro a hands-on demonstration of the technology at CES 2008. The projector has a brightness of around 8-10 lumens, and is capable of displaying an image of up to 50 in., although 3M's spokesperson Greg Roberts told us that, with perfect lighting conditions, it's possible to squeeze a 60-in. screen out of the projector."

8- 10 lumins?

WTF? 50inch screen with only 10 lumin is going to be SHITTY.

Re:8- 10 lumins?

Yes, but being able to project an internet site on an 8 x 11 sheet of paper on the go will be a big asset and very useful. A real computer in a pocket.

8- 10 inches?

"A real computer in a pocket."

Are you sure you're not just happy to see me?

Re:

had to that one of those projected keypads and you have a dream portable computer.

Re:8- 10 lumins?

"Yeah, let's project shitty quality photos"

My Nokia N95 has a 5 MegaPixel camera which produces some pretty good quality photos and video. It is hard to appreciate this quality on the 3"ish screen so having a projector would be a nice feature. No idea when I'd use it though, I can hardly imagine whipping out the projector at work or uni to show my mates my oh so cool pics. But this is the first time I've had a phone that does more than just do calls and texts, on a recent holiday I must've taken about 500 pics on the 4GB microSD card in it. Mobile phones are becoming very nice indeed imo.

Missing the point....

This is about selling phones, not about producing quality images (that might come in five years or so).

Remember polyphonic ringtones? Were they "quality" music? Nope, but we all secretly wanted them.

The gadget power of having a phone-projector is orders of magnitude more than a polyphonic ringtone. This thing will sell millions no matter how bad the image quality is.

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That's the essence of cellphones - doing a million things but SHITTY.

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That's how they will get you to buy the 25 lumins model next year, when the technology will ripen. Why should they lose out on the money they could make selling immature technology?

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I think the "optimal conditions" mentioned would be a quantum photon trap in perfect vacuum.

Re:

It's lumens:

"The SI unit of luminous flux, equal to the amount of light emitted per second in a unit solid angle of one steradian from a uniform source of one candela."

A small AA battery maglite has 15.2 lumens average, so it's brighter than a small flash

a basic tutorial

Being in the film industry, I work in footcandles usually and not lumens, but If I recall correctly the correlation between them is close (I'm not a cinematographer, so lighting is secondary to my normal job function). A 'birthday cake candle' in a pitch black room, will produce 1 foot candle of light at-- wait for it.. 1 foot. If you put a 1-foot-square surface (like a 12" x 12" piece of paper) 1 foot away from that candle, it will be hit with "1 lumen"

A 'normal' candle produces about 15 lumens. Incandescent bulbs (normal lightbulbs) produce about 15-18 lumens *PER WATT*. So this projector is roughly equivalent to
Now, there are claims of a 50" projection (diagonal, I assume) from this-- no specification as to how far from the projection source the 'screen' is, but light works on the inverse square law-- basically, as you double the distance from a given light source, you get a square root of intensity. So if this sucker threw 10FC at 1 foot, at 2 feet that intensity has dropped to 3.2. At 4 feet, 1.8. So if that 50" screen requires you to be 8 feet back.. forget about it.

Overall, this sounds like a cool little geek gadget, but as other posters have said, probably just another example of cellphones trying to do too much (too poorly ;). If they can increase the light output significantly, it might be useful for something other than showing someone really low brightness web pages shined onto a piece of whitepaper 10" away while in a darkened room.

Apologies if I screwed up any of my tutorial, as I said, I don't paint directly with light, I just admire the guys who do.

Re:a basic tutorial

The inverse square law only applies to an isotropic source - a light that's being emitted in every direction (like a candle). This is why lasers stay bright at a distance.

All that matters here is light output divided by the square inches of the screen. Assuming that this screen has a 4:3 aspect ratio and produces a 50" diagonal image, that means it produces 1200 sq in of image. This gives 10 lumens / 1200 sq in = .008 lumen / sq in.

I have no idea though if that's a lot or a little.

oh joy

And you thought laser pointers were annoying when they came out.

Seriously though, it is pretty cool.

That being said, I bought a cigarette lighter this week, and when I got home I discovered it had a laser pointer built into it, all for two bucks.

Soon my microwave will be able to use it's laser pointer to point at the projection it puts on my wall that my popcorn is done, as opposed to beeping, which would be oh so gauche.

I can see it now...

This is only going to lead to millions of college students slipping a 50" cock into the professor's lecture while he isn't looking.

Re:I can see it now...

I don't want to be that old guy who bitches about how easy kids have it these days, but when I was a college freshman, we didn't have anything like this. If I wanted to distract the class with an absurdly large cock, I had to whip out my own.

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I know! Can you believe he stole the AC's joke and somehow managed to post it 8 minutes before the AC did!

YOU FAIL!

Re:I can see it now...

This only raises the question, who the fuck is karma whoring on AC posts? I bet it's like, a Zen master or something.

I thought it was a dupe...

... but this is not the same as this one http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/03/0418221 [slashdot.org]. This one is led based and seems to be smaller but the PicoP one is laser based and images seems to be better. That is the one I want on a mobile phone. OTOH I don't want these on my mobile phone...

phones? bah!

sod the mobile phone market.

I am waiting for my mini laser powered home cinema projector that I can get for £100 (or $200 if you like), never have to change a £300 bulb on a £300 projector, never have a loud whirry fan and huge amounts of excess heat, generates a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens and can be tastefully hidden in a wall of books with a drop down projector screen on the over side of the room. Now *thats* a product I would get excited by.

Rubbish 10 lumen images projected from a bloody mobile phones of all gizmo's are nothing to me except an obvious tactic to attempt to sell phones. Of course the projector market might suppress this because of bulb sales, but who knows?

The alternative use for this technology is mini computers with projected screens and laser/IR keyboards that can fit in a pocket and allow office work against a hotel wall with full wifi, SSD and decent battery life. Now thats another use I would get exited by. I want my Zardoz projector/interface ring.

Re:phones? bah!

I am waiting for my mini laser powered home cinema projector that I can get for £100 (or $200 if you like), never have to change a £300 bulb on a £300 projector, never have a loud whirry fan and huge amounts of excess heat, generates a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens and can be tastefully hidden in a wall of books with a drop down projector screen on the over side of the room.

This [pcmag.com] might interest you, then.

Re:phones? bah!

a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens

Your language usage is weird. The word you are looking for is "bright", not "a respectable amount of lumens". Similarly, it's "hot", not "a respectable amount of celcius". And Sahara is "big", not "a respectable amount of square kilometers". Finally, Bush is "dumb", not "having an embarassing amount of IQs".

Disruptive technology

All the bleating about scope creep and so on completely misses the point. This is a potentially disruptive technology because it has the long term power to get rid of the _monitor_. Monitors are horrible, they are big and clunky. They determine the form factor of laptops and notebooks. Really and truly, we don't want them.

Now imagine in a few years where your display surface might just be a cheap light screen with a simple support to hold it at different angles. The computer can be almost any shape that suits, perhaps with a fold out keyboard. You can have a big screen on your desk, a small clip on screen that you use on the train. Perhaps the computer has a wireless dongle that includes the display driver, perhaps it's built in, perhaps both.

Using a curved screen might involve no more than an adjustable object in the optical path to deal with the pincushion distortion - use of lasers means focus at virtually any distance.

Microsoft has built up a huge business based solely on the mouse, monitor,keyboard model. Apple has started to move away from it. This is a little gadget which could reshape the desktop computer industry. It shouldn't be underestimated.

That's more like 5 inches

What counts in a projector is contrast (e.g. how much brighter is a "white" projected spot as opposed to a "black" projected spot).

Obviously this depends on ambient light, since the darkest part of the screen (i.e. the "black spot") is illuminated only by ambient light (assuming that 'black' in the projector means 'no light passes').

Illuminance is measured in Lux (lx). Lux is defined as follows.

Lux = Lumen / m^2.

Now, a "good" contrast is 10-15, i.e. a white spot will be illuminated with 10-15 times the lx a black spot is.

Normal ambient light is highly variable; a typical table in a lecture room should be illuminated with about 500-1000 lx; the ambient light on your typical screen in an illuminated room (i.e. not a theatre) will be illuminated with maybe 100-500 lx.

So in order to obtain a proper picture a projector should be able to do at least 1000 lx. Comparison: a typical home cinema beamer has about 2000 lumen and projects an area of about 2x1.12m; this means 2000 lumen / 2.24 m^2 = ~900 lx. And guess what, the picture is just fine when the room is "quite dark" and pretty washed out when it is illuminated.

With the claimed 8-10 lumen - let's assume 10 - you can thus illuminate

10 lumen / 1000 lx = 0.01 m^2

Assuming a picture format of 16:9, that's a picture size of

sqrt(0.01 m^2 / (16 * 9)) * 16 = 0.13 m width
sqrt(0.01 m^2 / (16 * 9)) * 9 = 0.075 m height

An incredible 13 cm x 7.5 cm! (5" x 3" for Americans).

That's a diagonal of 5.8". Makes sense since a 2000 lumen projector is 200 times more powerful and accordingly projects an image with sqrt(200) = ~14 times the diagonal.

Except in the darkest of situations, you will *never* have an usable 50 inch image with a lousy 10 lumen.

Re:For your cellphone? what use is that?

Why a cellphone? so that everyone can see who's calling me?

Wait, you mean, you mainly use your cellphone to give/receive phone calls? lol! 1998 just called, they want you back.

Re:Battery life ...

Seriously, could the manufacturers try to produce a phone that goes, like, a whole week on a single charge?

They have, it is called a cell phone. It has no camera, it doesn't surf the internet, no MP3 player, no mini-tv screen. It just makes calls. Mine is a Samsung SCH-A310. The call quality isn't bad either.

I guess when all that space is used for making a plain phone instead of the swiss army phone, the designers can concentrate on doing one thing well. In this case that one thing is making calls.