3M Beats Everyone to the Micro Projector Business

3M’s projector shows full-color, standard def video at a
rate of at least 60 frames per second—television quality. Its 10 lumens of
brightness make it powerful enough to overcome bright room lighting to project
an image about 15 inches across. When we took it into a dark room, it could
easily do 50 inches.

Instead of lasers, which Microvision and its rival Light
Blue Optics are using, 3M uses LED for illumination. They wouldn’t tell me if
it’s one white LED or three (red, green, and blue) bulbs. But my bet is on
one—given the size of the projector and the color quality—which was nice, but
not stunning.

Texas Instruments is trying to do the same thing with LED
and it’s DLP imaging chip—similar to what you get in rear-projection TVs from
Samsung. But 3M is using liquid crystal on silicon—basically and LCD on a
mirror that bounces light out the front of the projector.

3M won’t be selling final products, but will supply the guts
of the projector to companies that will sell it either as a handheld accessory
(about the size of an iPod Classic) or possibly even built into gadgets. No word
yet on who those companies are, but a 3M rep told me they are definitely ones
we’ve all heard of.

The projector’s a bit fat for cellphones—at least those made
in the last five years. But 3M promises to get it way smaller (and brighter and
with higher screen resolution) in the coming years.

What can you use it for? Well, the demonstration products I
saw take flash memory cards, have USB ports and/or have regular video inputs. I
can see it making a really nice iPod accessory.—Sean Captain

In bright light

In dark room

Want more? Check out our entire CES 2008 coverage here.