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Blow it up!

Whether it's presentations in the office or movies at home, it's time to project the big picture

PICTURE PERFECTGood old projectors now in their new digital avatars

The much-touted convergence between personal computer and television takes interesting new forms every day. The latest instance of a high-tech sangam brings together the hitherto separate worlds of home movie viewing and corporate presentations. Who would have thought the boring old projector, long considered a piece of office equipment, would now find a new home (literally), as a high-end consumer product?

That is because with movies increasingly available in digital formats, such as CDs or DVDs, there is no reason why they should not embrace the same technology harnessed by PC-based presentation tools such as PowerPoint and Macromedia.

Double duty

So today, the same digital projector can do double duty in bedroom and boardroom, as a way to view movies at home, with near-theatre quality — and create compelling presentations for professional audiences. For sometime now, two technologies have been fighting in the projector marketplace, LCD and DLP.

LCD or Liquid Crystal Display projector uses three separate glass panels, one each for the red, green and blue portions of the image. The panels act like shutters passing or blocking the individual colour of every pixel.

DLP or Digital Light Processing is a proprietary technology developed by Texas Instruments. Here, a single chip processes all three colours using thousands of tiny mirrors, each of which represents one coloured dot or pixel. The best DLP projectors, however, process the three primary colours separately, using one chip for each colour.

For long, industry wisdom had it that LCD projectors delivered a sharper image than DLP, which was great for presentations where high contrast was important. DLP, on the other hand, seemed to work best with movies. In fact, it is known as the cinema processor.

Canon recently made available one of their best-selling digital projectors, the LV-7240, for MetroPlus to evaluate. These days, both LCD and DLP technology are constantly improving. As a result, unless you are some sort of optical expert, it will be difficult to tell which technology fuels a particular projector. The LV-7240 is based on LCD, and puts out something around 2,100 lumens. This is an indication of how much light is pumped out by the projector and the minimum acceptable level is around 1,500 lumens. Like all projectors, this one comes with a variety of connection options, including what is known as the Audio-Video out (A-V out), and the RGB. The sockets are colour coded for dummies, so attaching a laptop or PC to view your Powerpoint or connecting a CD or DVD player or even the output of a television set is quite straightforward.

The 7240 can typically project an image of roughly one meter to 10 meters diagonal, but unless we are one of those Forbes 50 Billionaires, with a private theatre in the basement, we would typically project our home movies on a screen not more than two meters across. Using a good white matte screen of this size, the 7240 produces a brilliant picture even when the room is not fully dark.

In recent months, a new technology called LCOS or Light Crystal On Silicon has been developed, which combines the best of LCD and DLP. While the LV-7240, like most projectors of this class, costs around Rs. 1.2 lakhs, Canon has recently launched the slightly cheaper LV-X5 based on the emerging LCOS technology.

These days, projector costs are falling, but they are still in the range of Rs. 60,000 to 1.5 lakhs. That may seem like a lot of money, but not when you think of the alternative. A big screen plasma or LCD monitor would cost at least twice as much.

A. VISHNU

vishnua@hotmail.com

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