Color is key for Mitsubishi

By focusing on color rather than the usual sales points of brightness and weight, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America Inc. is aiming to separate itself from the competition with its ColorView projectors, which were added to the General Services Administration schedule last week.

Made especially for color-critical applications, ColorView projectors provide color quality for use in large format displays for satellite surveys, weather maps, radar imaging, geographic surveillance, training and other data, or video display applications, said James Chan, senior product manager in Mitsubishi's presentation products division.

"It's not all about brightness and light weight," Chan said. "It's more about colors. If people didn't care about colors, they could use an overhead projector, so colors are definitely important."

The ColorView feature allows presenters to adjust six different colors: the traditional red, blue and green, and also cyan, magenta and yellow, a unique feature of the Mitsubishi product.

NASA is already using the company's X400 portable LCD projector, which weighs less than 15 pounds and projects 3,000 lumens, for satellite imagery of different geographical surveys. Fritz Hasler, head of the visualization and analysis lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said he has used the X400 for everything from overhead slides to Microsoft Corp. PowerPoint presentations on screens as large as 72 feet.

Hasler said the X400 is "robust," which he defined as "taking anything I throw at it and it being acceptable without a lot of adjustments." He has traveled with the 14-pound X400 to both Canada and Central America, and aside from saying "higher resolution would be nice some day I'm nuts about the X400."