Panorama Labs Announces Successful Operation of World’s First Magneto-Photonic Projector

"Panorama Labs, the company pioneering magneto-photonic crystal technologies, announced today that it has completed and successfully operated its first magneto-photonic projector. This operational, small-scale digital projector was built to demonstrate Panorama Labs’ groundbreaking technology and is the first step in a process that will yield a revolutionary new display technology with tremendous benefits to the digital cinema and digital display communities.

The Panorama Labs projector shows breakthrough performance features including high-speed switching, pixel remanence, low power requirements and high thermal tolerance. This is the first time that light has been successfully directly manipulated by a projector imager, without utilizing liquid crystal or micro-mirrors, projecting an image on a screen. The heart of the system is a micro display light engine, based on the principle of magneto-optical switching, which will form the core technology for a number of applications including digital cinema projectors, rear projection TVs, home theater projectors, displays, mass storage, and telecom switching devices.

This is a milestone in the development of a 4K digital cinema projector, as it proves magneto-photonic crystal technology can compete with the older and more commonly deployed technologies like LCD, LCoS, and plasma in digital display, and DLP in theatrical display.

“This technology uses an imager that has no moving parts or analog drift, is inherently stable and is virtually heat proof. Our imager is fabricated at 600 degrees Celsius, so temperatures of 85 degrees Celsius or higher that are destructive to all other digital cinema projector imagers are of no consequence,” said Harry Mathias, Panorama Lab’s vice president of R&D for Digital Cinema."

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