Multimedia Projectors – History
The LCD projector was invented by New Yorker Gene Dolgoff. He began working on it in 1968 while still in college as a way to produce a video projector that would be brighter than the 3-CRT projectors available at the time. The idea was to use an element referred to as a “light valve” to regulate the amount of light that passes through it. This would allow the use of a very powerful external light source. He finally settled on Liquid Crystals in 1971 after trying many different materials. It took him until 1984 to get an workable liquid crystal display (LCD), which he then used to build the world’s first LCD projector. After building it, he saw many problems that had to be corrected including very noticeable pixels and major light losses. He then invented new optical methods to create a high efficiency and high-brightness projector and invented depixelization to eliminate the appearance of the pixels. With patents all around the world, he started Projectavision, Inc. in 1988, the world’s first LCD projector company, which he took public on Nasdaq in 1990. He licensed the technology to other companies such as Panasonic and Samsung. In 1989 he was awarded the first Darpa contract ($1 million) for proposing that the US HDTV standard should use digital processing and projection. As a member of the National Association of Photographic Manufacturers (NAPM) Standards Subcommittee, IT7-3, he along with Leon Shapiro, co-developed the worldwide ANSI standard for measurement of brightness, contrast, and resolution of electronic projectors. Currently the only manufacturer of the LCDs included in LCD projectors are Epson and Sony and Epson is the only company reselling these to others. Early LCD systems were used with existing overhead projectors. The LCD system did not have a light source of its own: it was built on a large “plate” that sat on top of the projector in place of the transparencies. This provided a stop-gap solution in the era when the computer was not yet the universal display medium, creating a market for LCD projectors before their current main use became popular.