Liquid crystal lasers promise cheaper, high colour resolution laser television

[mccarrot]

http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/COSMOS/

Maybe the Liquid crystals can also help us to get differen colors from one laser source.

[tocket]

Dye lasers have been around for ages. This is just a dye laser with a twist (get it? ).

It's still a good idea though, but I doubt we'll see the technology used in laser shows any time soon.

Here's a quote from one of the nature photonics articles:

Despite their potential benefits, there
is a consensus that these lasers still have
some way to go before they will become
commercially available. “It’s not at the
practical stage yet,” says Takezoe. “Nobody
has created a continuous-wave laser yet.”
Morris confirms that the demonstration of
a continuous-wave liquid-crystal laser is now
one of the next challenges. Only picosecond
pulsing of up to 20 pulses a second has
been demonstrated, he says. Typical output
energies range from hundreds of nanojoules
per pulse up to 10 μJ per pulse, and slope
efficiencies are in the range of 1–30%. “The
main limiting factor for continuous–wave
lasing is related to the light emitter that
is doped into the liquid crystal,” he says.
“These are typically laser dyes which are
not suitable for continuous-wave operation
owing to photobleaching and other effects.” In
conventional dye lasers, this is circumvented
by keeping the dye flowing and effectively
‘flushing’ out the energy.

Another, perhaps more serious problem, is the modulation speed. We need rise/fall times three orders of magnitude faster than what LCDs can provide.

[LaserLover]

Mitsubishi are still the first one's on the global block to release a laser TV.
I heard the Laservue 65 inch TV sells for a cool $7K USD.
Anyone see one in person yet ?

[Laser Ben]

I've seen a few laser TV's using the coherent OPSL setup. I have not seen one of the Mitsubishi one yet. For $7k you could get a nice RGB set out of it.

[mixedgas]

Most likely the ones out now do not use tem00 beam style emitters, but something more like a fat beam array.

Steve

[Laser Ben]

Well it is a projection TV so it would want the best beam for when it goes through the optics. Maybe not TEM00, but definitely good beam specs.