Lasers may mean bucks

Lasers may mean bucks

Larry Wilson

Tired of looking at pictures of your friend's dog on a tiny cell phone screen?

If Corning Inc. is successful, you might not have to squint at the latest photo of Daisy any more.

The Twin Tiers' largest employer is in a race to create a commercially viable miniature green laser -- the key to placing tiny projectors in devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants and laptops.

If the research at Sullivan Park is successful, you could soon see giant photos of your friend's dog -- up to 100 inches in diameter -- projected from a cell phone onto a screen, a wall or a ceiling.

To make a truly miniature projector requires tiny red, blue and green lasers.

Red and blue lasers have already been successfully miniaturized. But without the green, the Lilliputian projector can't produce a true color image.

Corning Inc., of course, is not the only company that has caught onto the commercial potential of miniature green lasers.

Scientists and engineers around the world are looking for the key to trimming the size of the lasers in order to make miniature projectors possible.

Last month at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microvision Inc. of Redmond, Wash., unveiled full-color miniature projectors using green lasers from Corning Inc. and Novalux Inc.

Microvision said in a press release that its miniature projectors are small enough to be inserted in devices such as cell phones.

In such devices, they could produce sharp images as small as a laptop screen or as large as a plasma TV screen, the company claimed.

The projectors would add about $100 to the cost of a cell phone.

It's unclear how much customer demand there would be for the pocket projectors. But market research firm Insight Media estimates 5 million units could be sold by 2009 and 15 million by 2011.

If you don't think it's worth paying another $100 for a cell phone to project pictures of your dog (or your cat or your kids), there are other potential uses for the device.

Once the technology is perfected, it could be used to project Power Point presentations and videos as well as slide shows.

In addition to Corning Inc. and Novalux Inc., companies such as Germany's Osram GmbH are frantically trying to downsize the green laser.

For the winner, there's a potential market of several hundred million dollars a year to be tapped.

For Corning Inc., that would be another step toward the diversification that the Twin Tiers' largest employer has as one of its priorities.