We got excited about projectors on handsets in around 2007 when Texas Instruments, the dominant force in projector chips for TVs said it was looking to put one into a handset in the 2009 timeframe. This week researcher In-Stat is projecting their arrival in 20 million annual unit volumes over the next fives years.
We can’t help worrying that the reason that miniature projectors have had no breakthrough previously, is the conspicuous lack of video that gets onto handsets, despite all the reporting to the contrary, and the increasing tendency to output what video there is on handsets through TV out systems. Yes video usage is going up and up each year, but it’s still not reached 10 minutes per owner per day, that’s why we say such a conspicuous lack of video.
To date TV out is mostly a wired capability, although this is because there is no single standard for projecting video across a room wirelessly. Sure dual mode handsets can use wi-fi, in fact we can see little else on the horizon, and that includes all the 60 GHz variants, which will have to come low down enough in power consumption, in order to sit well on a handset.
But over the past few years it has become fairly standard that handsets with high resolution cameras have been able to output to the TV set through HDMI. And if your phone can output to a TV set or a PC, then it would only need its own projector back in the bad old days of pre-iPhone, when screens just weren’t good enough to share video on a phone.
That’s hardly going to be true of devices like the iPad and even the HTC HD2, which has a monstrously good and large screen for a smart phone. So touch brought us devices with more of the surface area as a screen, that in turn has attracted slightly larger devices which has led to an outbreak of tablets, and already we can connect with smart phones to the TV. So where is the demand going to come from for Pico sized projectors?
There will inevitably be, as there have been for a while, devices which come out of small experimental, mostly Chinese, manufacturers, and they will garner some acceptance around the world, but we see almost no requirements for separate Pico projectors and precious few companies good enough to integrate them into phones without burning up the battery. And anyway, the need seems to have evaporated.
In-Stat says ‘The number of companies developing pico projectors now stands at 18, and is growing. The list includes pico projection heavy weights like Himax, Micron Displaytech, Microvision and Texas Instruments.’ But as we said before, Texas is already a few years late with its own predictions.