By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
A pocket-size mini projector for mobile phones will go on sale in South Korea as early as September at SK Telecom stores, the device's inventor Iljin Display said Thursday.
The ``Nano Projector'' is about the size of a packet of cigarettes and can make a 20-inch color screen on a wall when looking at photos or watching mobile TV broadcasting on handsets, the company said.
SK Telecom is to sell the device on both domestic and overseas markets. The price is yet to be decided but will be affordable for ordinary consumers, Injin said.
``The Nano Projector overcomes the screen size limit of portable electronics appliances. It will become a new growth engine for the mobile industry,'' Kim Ha-chul, CEO of Iljin Display, said in a press release. The company estimated the market's value to be around 10 billion won this year, expanding ten-fold through next year.
The Nano Projector is battery operated and can be connected to mobile phones via a standard data cable. It could be especially useful in watching mobile TV programs or making video calls, the company said.
Furthermore, Iljin plans to mass-produce a coin-size projector module later this year, which can be built into cell phones sold by SK Telecom.
The company first demonstrated prototypes of the mini projectors in April 2006.
An LCD projector is a device utilized for displaying video images or data. It has become widely used at offices and schools over the past decade, replacing traditional slide projectors and black-and-white overhead projectors used in the past.
The projectors usually contain three separate LCD glass panels, one each for the red, green, and blue components of the video signal. But Iljin said its new Single-LCD technology reduced it to a single panel, by switching the light signal between the three colors within one millisecond _ short enough to be missed by the human eye.
Picture quality and battery life were not disclosed.