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The
Olympus arch-shaped high-definition display at the July 2000
DreamTech show, which measured 12 meters wide by 4 meters high,
attracted a lot of attention.
(Click on image to expand it) |
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----What technical hurdles did you have to overcome?
About the time of the OTF80 fair, the screen
was beautiful if you looked at it straight on, but there was a
slight but noticeable shadow when you looked at the screen from
an angle. Following improvement after improvement, we finally solved
the problem by completely remaking the screen in a different manner.
The screen is also entirely a product of in-house development.
There simply isn't any company making solid screens of that size.
We had no choice but to try having 50-inch screens made for us
and sticking them together, but in the end we thought it would
be far better if there weren't any join at all on the screen--it
mars the image, don't you think?
The screen itself is actually made up of three
separate layers. The layer nearest the front of the screen diffuses
the image. Behind that is one of the keys to this product's design,
namely a special sheet that acts as a lens. Perfecting the production
technology needed to make a completely flat 100-inch sheet lens
was extremely difficult. This was one of the major problems that
we had to solve at the Imaging Technology Department. But we would
not have had any product if we had not overcome it! This product
required a combination of technologies spanning electrical, mechanical
and software engineering. On the mechanical side, getting the screen's
connections to work was the hardest nut to crack.
----Is the screen limited to 100 inches, or can it be varied?
It can, but the height of the display becomes
a problem if you want to try to get a bigger screen into a normal
type of office. For instance, with a 110-inch screen, the height
would be 2.5 meters. Fire prevention laws also mean that you need
to leave at least 10 centimeters free between any installation
and the ceiling, so there are restrictions on the size. We selected
the size of this model because we thought it would have the broadest
general applicability.
It can certainly be made smaller. You could
also make the screen quite a bit larger, but then you have the
difficulty of making such a large hard screen. When the screen
gets that large, often you would not be able to install the display
inside a building without taking out the doors first. Once you
reach a 200-inch or 300-inch size, I think a soft screen makes
much more sense. The depth of the current model is one meter, but
we're aiming to make the next generation of models much slimmer.
Even once you have solved the technical side,
as soon as it becomes a product you have cost issues to deal with.
While we have had a number of large gaps to close on that score
with this product, the thorniest issue has been with color consistency,
which is a software problem. Until now we had always used an expensive
kind of spectrometer that would measure colors and help ensure
color consistency throughout the image. But in the commercial version,
we could not use such a high-priced component. So what we did in
the end was to use a standard commercial device out of a monochrome
digital camera, which lowered the cost considerably, and then we
designed a whole new software algorithm for generating the highly
precise color measurements needed. In this case we solved the problem
by employing separate color regeneration technology that we had
developed through participation in a national research project.
----Is color adjustment really so difficult to do?
Yes, it is. Depending on the shape of the display,
you need the precision of a color-measuring device. We are using
one in the HDPS100 that is adapted from a device used in digital
cameras.
The effect is not so obvious with intense
colors or mid-range hues, but with the lighter, subtle colors--for
instance, the color of a blue sky, a cloudy sky, or a snow-capped
mountain--if the color transmitted by the projector is even slightly
different, it shows up very noticeably on the screen.
If you use an expensive light-measuring component,
it can do anything. But in a product you need to make the design
cheaper while maximizing performance. |
