I waited until the last day to explore “the other side” of InfoComm, the video and projection world, which is a considerable chunk of real estate on the show floor. I was expecting to see some nice looking projection but I was totally unprepared for the giant leaps in technology. What first caught my attention was a “lampless” projector, which is market-speak for a projector with an LED source. There were several manufacturers who had versions of them and they use three LEDs, one red, one blue, and one green (surprise) in place of a UHP lamp but the rest of the DLP engine is the same, except for the spinning dichroic wheel. They are surprisingly bright and the colors are vibrant, just like the difference between conventional incandescent Christmas lights and LED Christmas lights. Another major area of development is in 3D projection. You could hardly walk three steps without tripping over another 3D projector. I thought they had little to do with live event production but the manufacturers seem to think otherwise. I was told that rental and staging companies are showing a lot of interest in them. I thought it would be a hard sell to ask 20,000 screaming teens to wear the decidedly unhip polarizing glasses but then, they had no problem wearing them in the theatre to watch “Up.” Who knows, maybe next year’s concerts will feature 3D projection.

Aside from LED and 3D projection, projection is making major advances in brightness, size, cost, and several other areas of improvement like contrast ratio, elimination of artifacts, processing, and more. Michael Birdwell at Digital Projection explained to me that a lot of the 3D projection research has yielded several advances in conventional projection. He demonstrated how they eliminated motion blur by using some of the technology.


There were also a lot of advances in processing and networking as well. At the Electrosonic booth they demonstrated some incredibly hi-res video streaming with proprietary encoding and there were all sorts of warping, blending, windowing, masking, and manipulating technologies covering the show floor.
The one area where I expected to be dazzled and came away oh-so unimpressed was with all of the “hologram” demonstrations. If you’ve ever seen a real hologram then you know that it appears three-dimensional and when you change your viewing angle then you see an entirely different image. True holography has existed for at least 30 years. What I saw at the show is more like projection onto a semi-transparent surface. It’s more 2D than 3D and if you change your viewing angle you see the same image. These products would be better served with a different label. It’s an excellent see-through projection surface but a poor hologram.


We’re fortunate to live in a time when technology is advancing so rapidly that we can check in with the industry every few months and be totally surprised and impressed with some of the new technologies and products. Not even a recession can slow down the rapid pace of development when you live in exponential times.

Check out the pictures from the show here: www.prolightingspace.com/photo/albums/infocomm-2009