Microvision is a light-scanning tech company that focuses on new display technologies, and it unveiled a handheld laser projector prototype at CES 2008 this week, which I got a hands-on look earlier tonight. While the projection resolution was not as good at this point as our outsized expectations, the portable application has a bright future if a couple of important details are resolved.
The main story is that it’s cool to see a player that small deliver a clear projected image, and doing so easily, by plugging it to your player and pointing the image at any surface. I expect to see a few different retailers (or one really big one) come out with their application of Microvision's technology. The Redmond-based company will sell their laser output tech to individual companies this year instead of creating one device by itself. And for this reason, we should not expect to see the true version of this gadget until next year.
The projector can be connected to phones, media players and notebooks, and the image size can go up to about 8 ft. diagonally. The image itself is displayed at WVGA 848 X 480-pixel resolution DVD quality. Our first try didn’t look to be at that level of quality, though to be fair, it was mainly due to the environment and the content that the image projected.
For example, watching a few night scenes on the projector (in a dark room) made the image contrast unmanageable. Also, we noticed a distinct, flickering pulsation in the image displayed, and the
Microvision representative explained that this was a result of an alteration to the green laser that they would fix it before the tech was shipped to the manufacturers.
When we asked, Microvision reps wouldn’t say who those manufacturers are, but it’s clear they are looking at high-end clients who currently have multimedia phones or media players in the $300 range. The addition of the laser will likely add $50-100 to the pricing of those models.
And this is speculative and too obvious to be true, but if you take that information and add it to the fact that the demoed video content consisted of all Disney films
(with some personal pictures as well) and the media players used were the iPhone and the iPod, maybe a deal has already been struck with the
Cupertino leader.
