Mid-April was show time for more than 100,000 people who gathered in Las Vegas for this year’s annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention. But many who came to see the latest tools for the radio and TV broadcast industries weren’t broadcasters. Instead they were from churches, schools and corporate environment, looking for new ways to use audio and video to communicate with their constituencies.

A Place to Shop
Makers of medium- and large-venue video displays including Barco, Christie, Digital Projection, Eiki, Hitachi, In-Focus, JVC, NEC, Proxima, Sanyo and Sony and others, featured their latest projectors and thin screen monitors at NAB, including new features to help ease installation and maintenance. Large displays were offered for churches, rental/staging environments, electronic cinema and sports scoreboards, as well as smaller systems for meeting rooms and other uses.

Concern about the economy may have contributed to the appearance of modest cutbacks in show budgets. Some projector manufacturers occupied smaller booths than in previous years, and a few well-known people were looking for new jobs. But the tone was generally upbeat, with many new display products offering more light output and new convenience features at the same or lower prices than prior models.

New Projectors
As expected, several manufacturers showed new projectors in the 3,000-lumen range, with features such as network compatibility and flexible optics to simplify installation and operation. Several projector manufacturers are adding electronics that will permit their projectors to be controlled over an Ethernet LAN. This feature enables remote switching of input signals, setup and diagnostic routines, and is a step along the inevitable road to fully wireless remote operation.

Many new projectors are smaller and lighter than their predecessors, while offering enough light output to be usable in fully lit rooms. And aggressive pricing puts them in range of churches that may have previously been unable or unwilling to invest in this level of performance. “Low maintenance and low cost of ownership are particularly important in churches,” said Christie Digital Systems product manager Zoran Veselic.
Christie introduced a new 3,000 lumen XGA projector, the “Vivid Green,” (1024 by 768 pixel native resolution), weighing about 17 pounds, that can be used in a fixed installation or can be moved from room to room as needed. The unit uses three Sony 1.3-inch polysilicon liquid crystal panels and accepts a variety of computer and TV formats. “We consider LCD technology to be optimum in the 1,500- to 3,000-lumen range,” said Veselic.

Barco Projection Systems added new models to its 6000 series, including the native-SXGA (1280 by 1024 pixel native resolution) BarcoReality 6500 DLC, rated at 5,500 lumens, and the native-XGA BarcoGraphics 6500 DLC at 4,000 lumens. Both include networking features for remote control and maintenance.
Steady progress has been made by JVC along its timeline for developing its LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) projectors, according to Marketing VP Jack Waiman, whose new products at NAB included the 1,500-lumen DLA-S15 at 1365 by 1024 pixels, and two new XGA models, the 1,100-lumen LX-D1010 and the 1,300-lumen LX-D1020.

Digital Projection, Inc. showed two new SXGA projectors, the HIGHlite 4000SX and the HIGHlite 6000SX rated at 3,500 and 5,000 lumens respectively, and the HIGHlite 4100GV, a new 3,500-lumen XGA model, in addition to several larger models aimed at electronic cinema applications.

Sanyo used the NAB show to introduce two new large venue projectors, the PLC-XF12N offering 3,500 lumens (XGA) and the PLC-EF12N at 5,000 lumens (SXGA), as well as the 3,000-lumen PLC-XP30 (XGA) and the PLV-60, a 1,300-lumen unit in “wide XGA” (1366 by 768) format. All are LCD-based models. “We’re really starting to target the church market,” said Presentation Technologies Sales Manager Mark Holt. “It is a market that seems to need lots of performance – 2,000 to 5,000 lumens - at low cost. Holt noted that Sanyo is the largest maker of LCD projectors because of its extensive OEM business.

A wide range of projectors was shown by NEC Technologies, covering ultra-portable, mid-range and large-venue applications. The SX6000 and the XT9000, providing SXGA at 5,000 lumens and XGA at 8,000 lumens respectively, both target the rental/staging business, and the GT1150 is a 3,000 lumen XGA unit aimed at fixed installations. “The line meets a wide range of church needs,”according to Joe Azzarello, NEC’s product manager for projection systems. “We expect to see 2,750 lumens in a native SXGA unit in a few months.

New Technologies
There were no real surprises in the projection technology arena, as LCD, LCoS or DMD/DLP are being used by all manufacturers. But steady improvements in these basic display components are helping projector makers to offer steady increases in resolution and light output. While many exhibitors showed new products at NAB, most expected to make further introductions at the INFOCOMM show which will return to some of the same halls in June. (One exhibitor commented a bit wistfully, “I wish I could just put a tarp over my booth and leave it where it is until Infocomm!”)

Several exhibitors showed technologies for panoramic and 3D displays. Software from French company RealViz allows creation of panoramic (still) images from a mosaic of small overlapping images. German company 4D-Vision Gmbh presented an autostereoscopic (no glasses) display and software for 3D image viewing. Be Here corp., of Los Angeles demonstrated its technique for sending a 360-degree panoramic image of a sporting event to viewers who can then establish personalized viewing positions to watch the action or replays. And Christie Digital Systems announced its “Mirage” line of high-brightness DLP-based stereo projectors, including the 2,000-lumen/SXGA Mirage 2000, the 5,000-lumen/SXGA Mirage 5000, and the Mirage 10000, an XGA model rated at 10,000 lumens.

Barco illuminated the area in front of its booth with its new “D-Lite” display, a super-bright array of light emitting diodes (LED) in stackable modules somewhat like the cubes used in video walls. While the high brightness is attractive - roughly equivalent to shining a 2,000-lumen projector on a 12-foot-by-12-foot screen - the relatively high cost of these units may limit their use to large high-budget entertainment venues, although they may fill a niche in some churches where a compelling video display is needed in the presence of very high ambient illumination.

The fabled ‘Vegas Strip continued to be a showcase for the latest in high-brightness video displays, used for signs in front of many large casino-hotels, and one of Barco’s new “D-Lite” units served as in outdoor information display at the entrance to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

An interesting - if thought-provoking - technology of motion capture appeared in several manufacturer’s booths. Human or animal motions are traced by strategically placed reflectors attached to skin or clothing. Positional information is detected and saved in a form that can be easily integrated with animated cartoon characters, producing an unexpected degree of realism. Coupled with accurate rendering of facial expressions, these technologies are close to providing realistic simulations of human actors.

An NAB sideshow called “Etopia” provided a venue for suppliers of satellite-based digital audio and streaming internet video. But hidden among these exhibitors a young firm named Silicon Video - a spinoff from chipmaker Genesis Microchip - showed dynamic real-time correction of an image that had been reflected off a mirrored sphere. Practical applications include wide-angle surveillance displays and projectors that can be corrected for virtually any kind of distortion that has been created by off-axis projection.

The NAB show has become an efficient place to window shop for projectors and related equipment, such as video editing systems, sound equipment, video cameras and control systems. And it also is a place to preview products, preparing for some serious shopping at the Infocomm show in June. The “church market” is important to the projector manufacturers, who commented favorably on the number of church representatives who visited their booths.

Finally, in a sign of the times: perhaps for the first time at an NAB show, thin-panel displays - such as plasma and liquid crystal panels - may have outnumbered cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, as exhibitors took advantage of compact new display products in their booths to help sell their wares.

Joe Hallett is a writer and consultant based in Tualatin, Oregon. A display veteran, he has participated in development of display technologies that we take for granted today, such as solid state television sets, color monitors for computers, light valve projectors and flat panel displays. He can be reached at joeh24@aol.com.