Its nice to see the injection of research and development that is flooding into pico projectors, especially the work some wonderful laser developers are doing. We happened across this Journal on a development within Blue Lasers this week, which presents a blue-diode laser that emits at 523 nm, optimised to provide a laser output power of up to 169.4mW.

If you consider that the blue laser within the MicroVision ShowWX opearates at 50mW (Red at 90mW, Green at 60mW) this higher output represents potentially more than 3 times the brightness/output. No small figures if this is a correct interpretation of his paper.

Some interesting points from the abstract:

“Lasers present many advantages over currently used light sources for projection applications. Compact as well as efficient displays can be realized with RGB laser systems. The extreme brightness and collimation of lasers enable very efficient light collection. For portable, battery-powered microprojectors or even integrated devices, where the efficiency becomes even more critical, 50 mW per color is enough for a luminous flux on the projection screen of 20 lm.”

…This almost points directly at the Microvision show wx, referencing figures seemingly taken from its specification.

“While blue and red diode lasers in this power range are becoming widely available, the bottleneck for this application is still the lack of integrated green laser sources. We present here a blue-diode pumped Pr3+-doped LiYF laser emitting at 523 nm. By optimizing on many aspects of the crystal and resonator, we increased the laser output power up to 169.4 mW, which corresponds to a total power conversion efficiency of 7%. Moreover, lasing in red can be obtained with the same crystal with similar or even better output powers”

…This all points very nicely towards pushes in the progression of micro-laser-projectors, could they replace LED’s as the lightsource of pico projectors? Certainly sounds more futuristic to lase the image to the wall