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."
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.
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.
"Mobile phones are becoming very nice indeed imo."
I think I'm regressing technology wise. The higher I move up the corporate food chain the less use I have for widgets. I just traded my Treo 7XX (whatever it was) for a Motorola W385. I never used anything but the phone and contacts on the Treo and it seemed better suited to some young whippersnapper who would use everything on it. I'm more interested in simple use and strong, solid signal and in addition I don't want to be looking at emails all times of
Why you would need to project photographs from a cell phone,
Umm, have you ever tried _looking_ at photos on a typical cell phone screen? How about showing on to a group of people? No matter what resolution we might get, they remain _small_.
If you can get fair quality and resolution on a monitor-sized surface, its a whole different world. I think it would be a hit for exactly the same reasons that camera phones have been.
Hell, even pure digital cameras would would about double their usefulness with something li
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.
No, I didn't and don't want polyphonic ringtones. I want loud MIDI-like ringtones that cut through crowd noise, music I'm listening to, and other sounds. I don't want to hear a catchy chorus of a song for a ringtone, just as I don't want "clever" quotes from popular tv shows for my computer sounds.
As for the projector, I'm not sure how an 8-10 lumens projector will look. I have my doubts, but I'll take a look when they reach market.
No, I didn't and don't want polyphonic ringtones. I want loud MIDI-like ringtones that cut through crowd noise, music I'm listening to, and other sounds.
Loud MIDI-like ringtones that cut through everything _are_ polyphonic ringtones. The only difference is that monophonic ringtones sound like Casiotone, and polyphonic ringtones just sound nicer, but with the same clarity.
I don't want to hear a catchy chorus of a song for a ringtone, just as I don't want "clever" quotes from popular tv shows for my computer sounds.
Remember polyphonic ringtones? Were they "quality" music? Nope, but we all secretly wanted them.
Some of us to this day could care less about ringtones and have never wanted them; not even "secretly". This is just another example of feature-glut that is not wanted. I can't wait for my toaster to play mp3s or my vacuum cleaner to take incoming calls, for that matter.
"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 flashlight... if that floats your boat, er lights your night.
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.
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.
Right. You'd need at least a beowulf cluster of these...
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.
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?
What are you talking about. It will be perfect for overage kids to scare the crap out of each other at night as various monsters, zombies, spectres and a random assortment of dangerous animals and insects sized to a fifty inch screen leap out from random reflective surfaces.
Oh yeah, a really hot fad it most certainly will be;).
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 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.
Kids these days. Surely taking up one penis enlargement offer is enough for anybody. I bet you were also checking the time on one of your dozen or so cheap Rolex's too.
... 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...
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.
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.
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".
I take it that not much excites you, as in you're impossible to please. It looks like you want to have it both ways, as if you'd want a unicorn but are not willing to actually pay for it.
There are LED projectors available and coming out, but it hasn't really come of age yet, they aren't that bright yet.
I think there are several great projectors available. I wouldn't be too turned off by bulb life, my first projector lasted about five years on a 2000 hour bulb.
Why a cellphone? so that everyone can see who's calling me? I see a lot of other cool possibilities, perhaps a new market for personal portable media.
What about adding this projector to portable videoplayers/camera's or a (video) iPod (iPhone as well)
Or build it into a car / (portable) gps navigation system so you can use your cars windscreen as a transparent heads up display!
Another cool application could be a replacement of the virtual laser keyboard [thinkgeek.com] creating a virtual optimus [artlebedev.com] with dynamic keys:)
Now everyone can have their princess leia projected while talking to her, of course she is on the wall but one day she will literally spring up from the phone as you lay it down on the table and chat using your BT headset.
Hell, done right we will eventually be able to do presentations for people who can't come into the office. Real time video and projection combined to make a cool tool. I figure it is just like cell based cameras, first two generations suck before something truly useful comes along
8-10 Lumens and they try to sell that? That's less bright than a candle. Now I know we started cinema with candles and camera obscura, but what this means for real life is that you have to make the room dark, as in pitch black, in order to see anything.
Look at some comparisons [wikipedia.org]. Note that normal projectors like you use for home cinema, have 200 Lumens and up.
I'd love one of these, if only so I could send captured plans to allies in the memory systems of one of these cell-phone units, along with an appropriate video message. You know, along the lines of:
"General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in person..." etc.
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.
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
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.
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.
8- 10 lumins? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:8- 10 lumins? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
8- 10 inches? (Score:4, Funny)
Are you sure you're not just happy to see me?
Parent
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Re:8- 10 lumins? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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Imagine those big pixels at 50". It certainly wouldn't be able to show anything like the 5mp images your phone can take.
This technology would be better made into a separate unit that can plug into a compatible phone.
When the resolution improves to even 0.8mp or 1.2mp then we are talking about something that is actually useful.
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I think I'm regressing technology wise. The higher I move up the corporate food chain the less use I have for widgets. I just traded my Treo 7XX (whatever it was) for a Motorola W385. I never used anything but the phone and contacts on the Treo and it seemed better suited to some young whippersnapper who would use everything on it. I'm more interested in simple use and strong, solid signal and in addition I don't want to be looking at emails all times of
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Umm, have you ever tried _looking_ at photos on a typical cell phone screen?
How about showing on to a group of people?
No matter what resolution we might get, they remain _small_.
If you can get fair quality and resolution on a monitor-sized surface,
its a whole different world. I think it would be a hit for exactly
the same reasons that camera phones have been.
Hell, even pure digital cameras would would about double their usefulness
with something li
Missing the point.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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As for the projector, I'm not sure how an 8-10 lumens projector will look. I have my doubts, but I'll take a look when they reach market.
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No, I didn't and don't want polyphonic ringtones. I want loud MIDI-like ringtones that cut through crowd noise, music I'm listening to, and other sounds.
Loud MIDI-like ringtones that cut through everything _are_ polyphonic ringtones. The only difference is that monophonic ringtones sound like Casiotone, and polyphonic ringtones just sound nicer, but with the same clarity.
I don't want to hear a catchy chorus of a song for a ringtone, just as I don't want "clever" quotes from popular tv shows for my computer sounds.
That would be wav or mp3 ringtones.
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I can see it now... (Score:2, Funny)
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Needs moar lumins?
What is a lumin anyway? Some sort of cross between a loofah and a human?
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"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 flashlight... if that floats your boat, er lights your night.
a basic tutorial (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.
Parent
"Perfect lighting conditions" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:a basic tutorial (Score:4, Insightful)
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 =
I have no idea though if that's a lot or a little.
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Oh yeah, a really hot fad it most certainly will be ;).
oh joy (Score:4, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I can see it now... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Absurdly large? (Score:2)
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YOU FAIL!
Re:I can see it now... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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thank you !
I thought it was a dupe... (Score:5, Insightful)
phones? bah! (Score:4, Interesting)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
This [pcmag.com] might interest you, then.
Parent
Re:phones? bah! (Score:4, Funny)
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".
Parent
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I take it that not much excites you, as in you're impossible to please. It looks like you want to have it both ways, as if you'd want a unicorn but are not willing to actually pay for it.
There are LED projectors available and coming out, but it hasn't really come of age yet, they aren't that bright yet.
I think there are several great projectors available. I wouldn't be too turned off by bulb life, my first projector lasted about five years on a 2000 hour bulb.
For your cellphone? what use is that? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why a cellphone? so that everyone can see who's calling me? I see a lot of other cool possibilities, perhaps a new market for personal portable media.
What about adding this projector to portable videoplayers/camera's or a (video) iPod (iPhone as well) :)
Or build it into a car / (portable) gps navigation system so you can use your cars windscreen as a transparent heads up display!
Another cool application could be a replacement of the virtual laser keyboard [thinkgeek.com] creating a virtual optimus [artlebedev.com] with dynamic keys
C
Re:For your cellphone? what use is that? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Didn't you watch Star Wars? (Score:2)
Hell, done right we will eventually be able to do presentations for people who can't come into the office. Real time video and projection combined to make a cool tool. I figure it is just like cell based cameras, first two generations suck before something truly useful comes along
Sigh (Score:2)
darkness calls... (Score:2)
Look at some comparisons [wikipedia.org]. Note that normal projectors like you use for home cinema, have 200 Lumens and up.
Another feature to be crippled by Verizon (Score:2)
Killer app (Score:2, Funny)
"General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in person..." etc.
Disruptive technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oh great! (Score:3, Funny)
That's more like 5 inches (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Battery life ... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
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