The Barcelona cellular Mobile World Congress has a combination of things on show ‘ some you can buy tomorrow, and others, such as new chip sets, that will take 9 months to two years before you can directly experience the benefit of them. But for our Faultline audience the component that is most likely to change attitudes to digital media everywhere is the Texas Instruments Digital Light Processor.
We can look back a year or two to when TI first mentioned the idea that a handset will be able to project a TV screen onto a nearby wall, to create a far better viewing experience than the handset’s screen itself, perhaps 15 inches across rather than the 3 inch diagonal maximums that pocket devices are used to, even today.
We have pointed to it and used it as an argument against everyone that has intoned ‘but I’d never watch TV on something as small as a handset,’ and it is one of those technologies that until you have seen it, you still think it is fantasy. Not only will it drive customer acceptance of mobile TV, we believe it will single handedly spread the word.
Everyone can remember the tiny hologram of Princess Leia in the Star Wars film and this is a device that’s taking us in that direction.
In the consumer electronics world we live the by three layered tenet, ‘I can afford one, I want one, and I know someone that’s got one,’ and it is ensuring that all three of these rules are complied with that drives consumer markets. It is that last item that is key to driving up the rate of customer acquisition, and with a device that creates a picture that can be shared, from a device which cannot, you have the perfect chance for this concept to spread like wildfire. Instead of handing your phone over one at a time to each of your friends to show off the latest YouTube clip, you can project the scene onto a wall so they can all see it together.
Texas Instruments says that production availability of new imaging chipsets called pico-projectors will be achieved this year.
DLP chips are behind rear projection TV screens, and are an incredibly difficult technology to get right, which is why Texas Instruments is the market leader and these is no clear second placed company. Intel threw itself into designing a rival chipset, and changed its mind and pulled out after a few short months during 2004.
The DLP chip contains a rectangular array of up to 2 million hinge-mounted microscopic mirrors. When a light source is played on these mirrors they can either reflect it to the screen or away from the screen, and each mirror effectively creates a pixel which can reflect a digital image onto a screen or other surface.
TI has steadfastly said that although it sells the stand alone projectors which can be pocket sized and which can be plugged into a handset, it was targeting this year to include the chips within the device, so that handset and projector can be sold together.
Once such devices come out, all over the business world there will be sales people storing their slide shows on them and projecting them over a coffee, rather than stiffly and starchily in a board room. It will be more of an executive show off item than a Blackberry was in its early years and it could grow faster than the use of cameras on handsets. But it is the integration into the handset that makes this possible. The devices are already available, a little expensive, more like a gimmick and require you to carry two devices and remember to recharge them both. It is only in a handset, when subsidized by cellular operators that people will be able to witness their usefulness and they will take off.
The DLP Pico chipset includes an imaging chip and a processor to enable a new class of handheld and mobile projection products. They will be available in the second half of 2008, which means likely use in a handset during the first half of 2009
When you add this to the existing OMAP applications processor architecture that drives most TI top end platforms, and realize that these are already powerful enough to drive enough pixels at a screen to power a high definition TV screen, then suddenly overnight the mobile viewing experience is going to change radically. It’s not that people cannot watch TV on a small, high quality screen, it’s just the way the perception changes when people can also share a video experience on a miniature device.
TI has partners for the DLP Pico chip including Foxconn, Sypro, and Young Optics. Sypro is a joint venture between Jabil and Carl Zeiss, the German camera specialist, the same company that made the impressive camera optics for Nokia’s N95.
‘Texas Instruments is making headway in an untapped market and appears to be forging a leadership position. We expect projection within handset devices to start appearing in 2009, in a market where significant volumes are expected over the next five years.’ said Bill Coggshall, founder of independent projector market research experts Pacific Media Associates. ‘This is an exciting time for the projection industry and TI is leading the way.
The DLP Pico chipset delivers an aperture ratio of more than 92%, tens of thousands of pixel elements, switching speeds of less than 20 microseconds and DarkChip native contrast ratio process technology. It is can display a wide range of colors and work with any LED illumination technology.
So far there have been just 15 million DLPs shipped, mostly into TVs and digital cinemas, but as it moves through the next few generations, it is safe to say this will find its way into something like 35% of all high end mobile devices, a number far north of where it is today.
Texas also said at the Mobile World Congress that its new OMAP 3440 applications processor is the industry’s first ARM Cortex A8-based applications processor running at 800 MHz to bring full HD camcorder functionality to mobile devices, giving users the ability to record high-definition (HD) video.
The new chip leverages TI’s high performance IVA multimedia accelerator to support 720p HD video record and playback, and TI says that consumers will be able to record HD video on-the-go for playback on an HDTV or to post and share from a mobile device.