“Interesting Times”
By Mark Harward, Syndiant CEO
September 9, 2010
The ancient Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times,” is certainly applicable to the companies working in the fast emerging pico projector business. One can look at virtually any emerging technology market to understand the market chaos which occurs while the market sorts out winners and losers. Unfortunately, not every technology can be a winner. The early personal computer market was littered with now forgotten “winners” like the TRS-80 and the Commodor-64. But it was products like the Apple II and later the IBM PC that emerged from the pack. The pico projector market is about to undergo a similar transition, from a low volume niche market to one that will excite consumers and explode into a mass-market product category.
Currently, a technology called Color Filter (CF) LCOS enjoys the highest sales volumes, largely because it enables a low-cost solution, albeit with low resolution and very poor color quality. Texas Instrument’s DLPTM technology currently has the #2 position today. Pico industry analysts now have enough insight into the market to forecast that in Field Sequential Color (FSC) LCOS will move from 3rd to 1st. DisplaySearch: “For the long-term forecast, we think LCOS field-sequent/ial will be number one, DLP will be number two, MEMS scanning will be number three, and LCOS with color filters will drop to be the lowest.”
I generally agree with this prediction and our team has enthusiastically taken on the challenge to become #1 with our leading family of VueG8TM FSC LCOS microdisplays. There are good reasons for the analyst’s prediction that FSC LCOS will take the lead:
- CF LCOS was earliest in the market and requires a simpler optical design. But color filter LCOS requires three (3) color filter (red, green, blue) sub-pixels which inherently make it bigger than FSC LCOS. Already the colors tend to bleed together which cause poor color saturation with CF LCOS. But perhaps more important, requiring three sub-pixels fundamentally limits the ability to scale this technology, particularly as resolution is expected to increase. We expect CF LCOS to stay strong in applications such as toys where low resolution and poor color images are acceptable.
- DLP® has found its way into a number of low volume “test the market” products including some cell phones. DLP was a “safe” choice for early market products as it was an established technology from a large company. But as the analysts realize and many customers have indicated to us, DLP is fundamentally more expensive than LCOS and this problem grows worse as resolution increases. Syndiant is already making LCOS pixels that are half the size of the smallest DLP mirror which means we can fit 2X the pixels in the same space. DLP is also inherently much higher in power-per-pixel which as a big drawback for mobile applications. We expect DLP to be strongest in a niche market of A/C powered (non-mobile) applications whose main requirements are high brightness.
- We do disagree with DisplaySearch on MEMS scanning as we find it difficult to believe that MEMS laser beam scanning will meet the cost, size, resolution, power consumption, brightness and image quality (particularly speckle-free) that will get it out of being a high cost, very low volume, niche product. In our 6 way comparative technology demonstration at SID 2010, we demonstrated that laser scanning is presently uncompetitive on almost all of the critical market requirements. It will be tough to chase the rapidly lowering LED cost structure and output efficiency improvements which are driven by the huge volumes of the general purpose LED lighting market. And when lasers eventually become cost effective, we believe that FSC LCOS using lasers will be able to provide focus-free operation with higher resolution, lower cost, less speckle, and lower power.
Syndiant’s product roadmap positions us very well to play in the largest market segments:
- Mobile phone: This is the single largest market (~1.4B unit/year). The embedded module cost needs to be < $30 and move to < $20.
- Digital still camera and Digital Video embedded projectors (>100M units/year)
- Multi-media stand-alone projectors - think iPodTM with a camera, projector and wireless internet access
- Accessory projectors that are mobile (think wireless video transmission from your laptop, phone etc. – cables will eventually be eliminated)
- High Definition projectors for Gaming – Think of a 720P projector that can run on batteries or be plugged in for a high brightness mode. This is an attractive market with gamers spending about USD $20B per year.
- 3D – Now imagine a low cost gaming projector that can run in either 2D or 3D mode that your teenager can use in their room. Beyond cool. Of course, your kid will need to hide it or it will be swiped to watch 3D movies in the family room.
Our Syndiant team is working very hard to enable our customers can deliver truly amazing products to you that use Syndiant’s VueG8TM high resolution technology that far surpasses what has been available till now. The next few years will certainly be “interesting times” as the market sorts out winners and losers. One prediction we can make with confidence is that consumers will be big winners.
I’d like to hear from you. Perhaps you have ideas for cool applications for pico projectors or just want to tell me what you think. Emails to info@syndiant.com will reach me.
Cheers,
Mark Harward
CEO, Syndiant, Inc.
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Personally I would like to see if there is the possibility of combining the MEMS scanning mirror and the LCOS together,
