21st November, 2008
LED Projectors: When, Who, And Why?
Brent Butterworth
An off-site demo at September’s CEDIA Expo marked the debut of a technology that will change front projection more than anything since the DLP chip. The consensus among projection experts is that this technology—LED-driven projection—will eventually become a common fixture in home theaters and board rooms. The big question is: When?
First, a quick recap of LED’s advantages. In an LED projector, super-bright LEDs replace the high-pressure mercury lamp used in today’s conventional projectors. LEDs last far longer than bulbs; the PhlatLight LEDs used in some rear-projection TVs are rated to run 8 hours a day for more than 20 years. The lamps used in projectors today last 2,000 to 4,000 hours—and for the last quarter or so of their life, they become annoyingly dim. Replacement cost for these lamps is high, ranging from about $200 to more than $1,000. They also consume more energy than LEDs.
LED also offers the potential for picture quality improvements. LEDs can be dimmed quickly—on a frame-by-frame basis—so they can be adjusted to deliver the deepest blacks and optimum contrast for each shot in a video. Lamps respond too slowly to do this, although a similar if less profound effect can be achieved with an automatic iris. LEDs offer a wider color gamut than conventional lamps, and they come on almost instantly—there’s practically no warm-up time.
Chi Lin Technologies, the manufacturer that conducted the CEDIA Expo demo, gave us an update on the prospects for LED projection in 2009. Product manager Julian Chu said he expects the company to enter mass production in Q2 or Q3 of 2009, and confided that it already has at least one company signed up to distribute the projector in the U.S. (Chi Lin does not sell projectors under its own name in the U.S.—it makes them for other companies.)
Chu said that the company has completed a 2nd generation model which is more advanced than the one shown at the CEDIA Expo. He said the new unit is about 40% smaller and significantly brighter. Chi Lin’s specifications for the projector include a 100,000:1 contrast ratio and a color gamut 28% broader than the NTSC standard. The projector uses a liquid cooling system, which is necessary because the LEDs run at a very high current of 30 amps in order to achieve the necessary brightness. The prototype at the CEDIA Expo had a cooling fan that was vacuum-cleaner loud; no word on whether or not Chi Lin has improved that, but they’ll have to if they want into the home theater market.
Most companies that market projectors in the U.S. are keeping their plans for LED to themselves. However, Brian Carskadon, director of product management for Runco International, was willing to elaborate on LED’s future. He predicted we’ll see introductions of several LED-driven front projectors in 2009. He also predicted—not surprisingly—that the first ones will be expensive and noisy compared with their lamp-driven counterparts. He expects lower-priced, lower-performing models aimed at the casual market to appear toward the end of 2009.
And, most importantly, Carskadon expects LED to someday dominate the projection market. He said that once LED products reach performance parity with typical lamp-driven projectors (possibly as soon as two years from now), lamp-based products will be relegated to applications that require high brightness, such as extra-large home theaters.
For the integrator, LED has one big upside and one big downside. Of course, it will lead to more reliable installations and fewer service calls. But it’ll also give you fewer chances to interface with your clients.
Posted at 12:14 am | Comments (2)
7th November, 2008
How will the iPhone change home automation?
Brent Butterworth
Some insiders in the home automation business predict that a revolutionary change is set to sweep the industry. And others say it probably won’t be such a big deal.
The technology in question is the iPhone, which home automation manufacturers are starting to integrate into their systems. The idea makes obvious sense. After all, from a technical standpoint, the iPhone (and its cellphone-less cousin, the iPod Touch) isn’t terribly different from a wireless touchscreen.
But in other ways, the iPhone differs radically from a typical home automation touchscreen. It’s small: The screen measures only 3.5 inches diagonally, compared with 4 to 17 inches for a typical touchscreen. And it’s cheap: just $199 with a service contract (or $229 for the iPod Touch), compared to as much as $10,000 for a big touchscreen.
We wondered, though: How thrilled would systems integrators be to sell a $229 device when they used to sell one priced 10 to 40 times as much? And how much would their clients enjoy trying to control an entire home from a 3.5-inch, 480×320-pixel screen?
THE PROS
The big advantage of the iPhone in home automation is portability. You can slip it into your pocket and carry it around effortlessly. As Jim Carroll, president and cofounder of Savant Systems, described: “I can be in my media room and control that experience. I can use the same device to manage the media from my pool area. I can watch videos, listen to iTunes. There’s not a [touchscreen] remote I’m aware of that you can carry around which gives you access to and control of all those things.”
To Jeff Singer, marketing communications manager at Crestron, the biggest advantage is that the iPhone also works outside the home. “In the home, it communicates with your system via WiFi, but out in the world, it can communicate using the phone network. Anywhere in the world, our customers can see the lighting levels in their homes, the positions of the shades, the temperatures of all the rooms in the house, the status of the home alarm systems—and from anywhere in the world, they can change all that.”
Besides its unrivaled mobility, the iPhone has another advantage: public awareness. Many people don’t even know home automation even exists, but everyone’s heard of the iPhone—and 13 million have been sold to date. “The sex appeal of this is huge,” Carroll reported. “We’re signing up dealers because customers are asking for this kind of solution.”
THE CONS
The limited real estate of that little screen does demand some redesign of the control GUIs, but Singer and Carroll both say their companies don’t consider this a significant problem. “You may have to have a second page where before you could have just one,” Carroll explained. “But the resolution is high and with the number of colors it supports, you can do a lot with it.” Savant’s iPhone-based systems also use the TVs in a home to display control screens, in order to show more buttons on a single page.
However, Carroll and Singer strongly disagree in their predictions about how the iPhone will affect future system designs.
“I think the iPhone is definitely going to cut into sales of those things [touchscreens],” Carroll said. “Customers are cutting down on the number of remotes they’re using. People might have eight [touchscreen] remotes for everything in their homes, but if there’s only three people living there they might only need three iPhones or Touches.”
Singer doesn’t buy it. “That hasn’t been our experience,” he said. “Have our touchpanel sales been impacted because we offer control from PCs and laptops? Absolutely not. The iPhone is just another option. And when you have more options, you have more opportunities to meet or exceed the client’s expectations.”
Likewise, Singer sees no effect on margins for Crestron dealers. “The iPhone control app is absolutely free to dealers and programmers,” he noted. “How does that affect margin? However they want it to. If you want to throw it in to sweeten a deal, you can do that and it won’t cost you anything. If you see it as an opportunity to increase your margin, the markup can be whatever the client’s willing to pay.”
Asked if the iPhone will affect margins, Carroll replied, “I think in one sense yes and another no. In our implementation, it requires a server at the other end, which the customer will need to buy. And keep in mind that the iPhone is doing everything a touchpanel would do, so they make a margin on the integration as well.”
So the effect of the iPhone on home automation integrator margins remains an open question. But with Sooloos, Speakercraft, Proficient Audio, and others now offering iPhone control options, there seems to be no doubt that the iPhone will become an important interface—and perhaps even the primary interface—in homes of the future. As Carroll put it, “I think it’s a fundamental game changer.”
Posted at 12:28 am | Comments (4)
