Following the recent Integrated Systems Europe show, the ISE Daily team are pleased to present our list of the products that particularly caught our eye at this years event. Spanning the worlds of audio, lighting and video, either provide clever solutions for particular niche applications, or represent an elegant refinement to, or extension of, existing technologies. We recommend them to you.
Casio announced the launch of a laser and LED hybrid light source for the next generation of projectors under the concept names of Clear and Green, and Green Slim Projector – the world’s first mercury-free high-brightness projectors. While LEDs have held out the promise of a more environmentally friendly design, progress has been hampered by the lack of high-brightness green LEDs. Casio claims to have overcome the problem by employing an LED only for the red light. The blue component is supplied by a blue laser, while another blue laser with a phosphor converter is used for the green component.
Christie used ISE to launch MicroTiles, modular display tiles that can be stacked and clustered like building blocks to create display walls of any shape or scale. They use an entirely new, advanced optical design that produces unparalleled levels of brightness, contrast and colour reproduction, says the manufacturer. Designed for commercial use in public areas, the LED- and DLP-based system offers a gap of only 1mm between the tiles and a screen size of 16in wide x 12in high.
Crestron highlighted its DigitalMedia system as part of an extensive showcase at ISE 2010. Visitors were able to see first-hand how the DigitalMedia HDMI switchers cope with displaying different sourced material and manage all the data transmitted on the signals, including HDCP and EDID. In addition to HDMI, DigitalMedia also accepts, manages and distributes all analogue video and audio Ethernet, USB, KVM, power, and control over Cat5e or fibre.
Loudspeaker manufacturer Genelec introduced Audio Distribution over IP, which it described as a “groundbreaking, new and cost-effective technology for future products”. Audio Distribution over IP is designed to transport with minimum latency uncompressed, high-quality audio over a standard LAN, enabling accurate synchronisation of loudspeakers on the network, to create complex, multichannel IP-based audio systems. Significant cost savings and flexible set-up are said to be among the benefits of employing LAN networks to replace dedicated audio cabling.
Meyer Sound’s D-Mitri is a Gigabit network-based digital system that is set to be the foundation of Meyer Sound’s new digital products, starting with the LCS audio show control system and second-generation Constellation system. D-Mitri provides powerful multichannel audio processing and distribution in a completely integrated system. With Meyer Sound an active in the AVnu Alliance, promoting the emerging standards for audio-video bridging over Ethernet (AVB), D-Mitri is a significant development.
Centre of attention on the Mitsubishi Electric stand was a prototype 149in OLED display. Described as the first scalable OLED display, this was built from individual cubes with no visible join. The extremely high brightness makes it suitable for outdoor digital signage and public display applications, and it can be viewed from a minimum distance of 2m. It’s likely to be launched onto the market in 2011.
projectiondesign chose ISE 2010 to preview several projectors, but the big surprise was the FR12, billed as the world’s first Remote Light Source projector. The patent-pending FR12 Remote Light Source concept relocates the lamps from the projector to a rack-mount enclosure up to 30m away from the projector head. Light travels to the projector head via a Liquid Light Guide. The result is a compact, ruggedised, virtually maintenance-free projector head with completely silent operation.
Away from the public gaze, Prysm was showing selected visitors its Laser Phosphor Display (LPD) technology. This is a new category of large format display, which pushes a number of green buttons: it consumes up to 75% less power than other display technologies, and its low-impact manufacturing processes (and non-toxic materials) give it the smallest carbon footprint of any large format display. While the technology was not yet ready for a public launch, this is clearly one to watch.
Samsung took the opportunity to unveil a number of new products. One of the most significant for the B2B market is the F10 data projector – said by the company’s European B2B director, Pammi Mudhar, to be the world’s first to achieve 1,000 lumens using LED illumination technology. Given the much lower total cost of ownership offered by LED-based projectors, this is a significant step.
