iSuppli sees a bright future for picoprojectors

Market research and consulting firm iSuppli sees a high growth for the picoprojectors market in the coming years. Insofar as they are able to overcome the constraints of small screen size of our current electronic gadgets.

At the CES 2008, there were many announcements of mobile phones with integrated picoprojectors, suggesting that a lot of projects were underway. The rest of the year has unfortunately not been entirely due to the excitement, although there are currently several picoprojector models of the size of a phone.

In 2009, only Samsung was able to stand out among the major phone manufacturers. Samsung was able to present a model incorporating a picoprojector, the I7410, which has been seen in several shows, including the famous Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona.

However, opportunities seem enticing, judging by all the players in this future market… if we accept the perspective of 5 to 10 years of maturation. It is precisely this emerging trend that analysts at iSuppli are predicting. They predict an evolution of “integrated picoprojectors” from under 50 000 units in 2009 to over 3 million by 2013. Of course, these are just numbers. We’ll see many new models coming out around Christmas.

The adoption of picoprojectors should logically start with the professional sector, which could exploit such products integrated in smartphones or laptops to make instantaneous plug and play presentations without any hardware or projection rooms availability constraints.

The general public may also find very quickly its value in displaying content in large format such as photos, videos, websites or applications. Among the deployed technologies, iSuppli sees well positioned the DLP system (Digital Light Processing) from Texas Instruments (used by Samsung and the Optoma PK-101) but also LCOS technology (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) that will be soon presented by Nikon in its Coolpix NPC that we have already discussed in a dedicated article.

Despite the enthusiasm, the analyst of iSuppli still think that only a small number of electronic devices will have integrated picoprojectors in 2013. It remains to be seen, in any case, the news may tend to be more interesting for our friends picoprojectors.

Sanju Khatri, iSuppli analyst, explains his vision of this very optimistic anticipation:

“Mobile electronics bring to the general public and the professionals the portability they are looking for, leading more people to use products such as smartphones or netbooks as a platform and privileged access to the Internet. However, the major obstacle to the development of these practices is the small size of the screen compared to that of a traditional computer. Integrateded picoprojectors promise expanded displays, allowing to actually use mobile devices as a platform of choice.”

“The potential growth of the integrated picoprojector market in the coming years will be limited by technical challenges such as the level of energy consumption, miniaturization and manufacturing processes. Only when these barriers are removed that integrated picoprojectors will be more widely adopted.”

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