News - Samsung GALAXY Beam phone with built-in Pico Projector

[HEXUS]

1GHz dual-core Android smartphone and, oh yeah, a built-in 15 lumen nHD Pico Projector!

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[iiee]

Hmm nHD would that be another way of saying not hd? Other than that looks good honestly i hope its the first of many.

[Scribe]

Hmm nHD would that be another way of saying not hd? Other than that looks good honestly i hope its the first of many.

Haha it is a bit cheeky, actually means ninth HD (1/9) the idea is that to have the word HD means it must scale without pixel blending from a normal HD resolution, so you can perfectly take 1920x1080 and divide each dimension by 3 to achieve nHD or just sample every 3 pixels. There's also qHD which is quarter (1/4) and is 960 x 540. Essentially it means you can reproduce a HD feed with less pixels with the least possible distortion to the original image or the least processing power.

[Biscuit]

im curious about the lumens these state, because they dont sound enough to actually produce an image. Is it completely different using LED micro projectors to using a DLP?

[Scribe]

im curious about the lumens these state, because they dont sound enough to actually produce an image. Is it completely different using LED micro projectors to using a DLP?

LED projectors still use a secondary technology such as DLP, though can also be used in a direct array, however Lumen counts are typically measurements of the end product of light and so the technology behind the light shouldn't be a factor.

What's most likely a factor here is the relatively short projection distance of a mobile device which will reduce attenuation and the screen size which whilst up to 50 inches, will typically be smaller and so the light is more focused. If you imagine a typical projector produces an image up to 300 inches then vs 50 inches you're looking at needing 5.6 times more light to produce an image of the same brightness.

So if you think the image on a 300 inch projection is acceptable when the projector has say, 2000 lumens, then you'd need 357 lumens on a pico projector at 50 inches to match it.

A far cry from 15 lumens! but at closer distances there's less attenuation (loss of light) and also there are projectors with far less lumens that produce acceptable images to compare to. Also if you instead projected a 32" image you're concentrating the light even more and changing the factor from 5.6 to 13.5 which would only require 147 lumens to match a 2000 lumen projector, and so on.

But yeah, 15 lumens isn't going to look great in a light room.

[Biscuit]

Cheers scribe, i figured this was the case when they started releasing them but then when it appeared on a mobile phone i thought, 'may be im missing something'. Obviously i was wrong!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Just give us better battery life instead of all this flipping gadgetry!!