Bill Cosby can sit down on an empty stage and hold our attention. Most of us don't have that gift. If he chose to show overhead transparencies, he could dump them all on the floor and get big laughs while rearranging them. I know from experience that I get another reaction entirely.
Whether or not you have good communications skills or comic timing, you can appreciate a little help in getting your point across. By projecting your PC or Mac display onto a screen, a full-color, active-matrix presentation product by Proxima or a competitor can give you all the power of the computer when you are presenting information to a group, without the clumsiness of spilled overheads or upside-down slides.
Proxima's newest family of panels, the Proxima Ovation+ series, is a good match for the multimedia capabilities available with today's desktop and portable systems. Two of the series, the 842C ($5695) and the 846C ($6695), have LCD control circuitry for displaying video and animation. All three Ovation+ panels, including the 840C ($4995), can display bright, nearly 24-bit color. The 840C and 842C have 8.4-inch active-matrix LCD panels; the 846C has a 9.4-inch panel that projects a larger image for bigger audiences.
The 842C and 846C can handle NTSC, PAL, and SECAM video. In all other respects, the three Ovation+ panels have the same features and options, including stereo sound inputs and outputs. The price includes an infrared remote control, but you must send in your warranty card to get it. Options include the Proxima Cyclops Model 2050 interactive pointer system ($495) with a plug-in sensor unit and an infrared wand, and a laser pointer pen ($295) that also works with the Cyclops sensor eye. Both the Cyclops wand and the laser pen act as long-distance mice, giving you cursor control of graphical-presentation applications, with the wand at the screen and the pen from anywhere in the room.
I reviewed an Ovation+ 842C projection panel, equipped with the optional Cyclops 2050 system and the laser pointer. The Cyclops software was in beta testing. I attached the system to two 486 systems running different display systems, and three Macintosh setups that included an AV model and a Power Macintosh. Used with Proxima's Ovation+ 920WS ($14,795), which has 1280- by 1024-pixel resolution, the Cyclops can also work with Sun workstations running Solaris.
Finish Details
The Ovation+ 842C is a well-finished, 6.5-pound, 15- by 12.9- by 2.1-inch unit that sits on a standard overhead projector. Its total weight is a little higher with power supply, accessories, and cables. First-time setup took me less than a half hour, and subsequent setups took less than 10 minutes.
Along one side of the panel are the dual sets of connections for stereo sound in and out, video inputs for S-VHS and an RCA jack for other video sources, a serial port for directly connecting a Microsoft mouse, a "mouse out" pass-through port so that Cyclops users can control software through the serial port on the host computer, pass-through Macintosh and VGA outputs for driving the display of a desktop host computer, the connection accepting the host computer's video output, and the power socket. The cables to connect the panel to standard Macintosh video (DB-15 with sense pins) and VGA are included with the panel, with a hefty power brick and power cables of generous length.
Cyclops buyers receive a cable to connect the Cyclops output to standard Intel/PC serial ports and a Y-cable to connect to the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) of a Macintosh. Standard equipment is an infrared remote control to activate the panel's built-in on-screen menuing capability.
To exercise the Ovation+ to its full potential, I installed the Cyclops option in the projection panel, a simple matter of slipping off a plastic cover and sliding the Cyclops sensor unit into place in the projection panel. The Cyclops eye is an electronic camera that watches the projection area for the presence of the red pointer from the Cyclops wand or the optional laser pointer.
Up and Presenting
Setup for a presentation includes several steps and a number of cables, but the functions of each will be completely obvious after you have used the system a couple of times. After plugging in the Ovation+ power cable, the first step is to plug the provided video cable from the LCD panel into your computer's monitor connector. Optionally, you can plug a monitor into the panel.
To provide you with remote control of the presentation software running on your computer, you use a mouse connection from the panel to the PC serial port (Microsoft-compatible) or via the Mac's ADB port. You can use a serial mouse plugged into the panel or the optional Cyclops system. If you plan to alternate a video source with computer output, you connect a playback deck or other video source to the appropriate video inputs of the projection panel.
The Ovation+ 842C displays 640- by 480-pixel resolution, and the pass-through connection described above works with either Macintosh or PC systems set to that resolution. The Ovation+ panels can also display 800- by 600-pixel images by selectively dropping pixels (this works best with graphics images rather than screens full of text). The Macintosh video cable supplied includes the sense pins necessary to set Quadra internal video controllers to that resolution. I was also able to install the Ovation+ as a second monitor with the internal video on a Quadra 700; a NuBus video card supported the primary display.
The Ovation+ panels have a palette of 16.7 million colors, and Proxima claims that it can display the equivalent of 16.7 million colors simultaneously by using the techniques of gray-scaling, dithering, and frame-rate modulation to fool the eye. If the result isn't true 24-bit color, I found it passably close.
Stereo audio is supported directly, but the system will take mono inputs and simulate stereo output. You can plug the output from your sound card into the left input and the audio from your video deck into the right input and have the appropriate signal sent to both output channels.
Eye of the Cyclops
You must calibrate the Cyclops system for ambient light and projection distance. With the system on under the expected lighting conditions, the remote control is used to invoke the Cyclops calibration. Using either the wand or the laser pointer, you point and click on each corner of the screen in turn, and the Cyclops is then able to determine the relative location of future light clicks as long as the illumination level in the room does not change and you do not move the projector.
You use the wand from immediately in front of the screen, with the LED tip touching the projection screen. You can use the laser pointer from the back of a room of reasonable size, but it takes a steady hand to manipulate program menus accurately. The larger square buttons used in many tutorials should offer no problem. Although the ability to roam around the room with the remote control and the laser is appealing, I had difficulty controlling small movements with the laser.
Whether you use the LED wand or the laser pointer, manipulating items on-screen takes a little getting used to. The prerelease Cyclops software may explain some of the roughness. Operations became smoother with practice.
An included program called Lightboard creates an overlay on the projected image, onto which you can draw with the wand, laser pointer, or attached mouse. You can use the remote control to turn on the Lightboard option. You then select from a palette of eight colors and easily highlight portions of the display, much like John Madden highlighting the progress of football plays on television. You can switch the Ovation+ panel to straight white or black and use it for illustration, but the pointers do not support smooth drawing well enough for this to be very useful.
The Ovation+ converts analog video sources (NTSC, PAL, or SECAM) to digital for display on its active-matrix LCD screen. The new Proxima panels do true scaling of PAL down to 640- by 480-pixel resolution. For testing video, I used a Sony Hi-8 S-Video camera and displayed the same source simultaneously in three ways. I dubbed the output to VHS tape for playback on a traditional TV set, captured the S-Video material with a Quadra 840AV and displayed the resulting QuickTime video in Adobe Premiere, and played the material directly from the Sony camera to the Ovation+. Although neither digitized version matches the results of modern television screens in color range and shadow detail, the Ovation+ proved to be a close match to the Quadra's video, even when projected to many times the size. The remote control has a single button to cycle between the two video sources and the computer, making it easy to include taped video segments within a presentation.
Projector Optics
I should point out that, regardless of which projection panel you elect to buy, the quality of the optics in the projector will be more harshly exposed in this application than with any other use of a projector. Where the projector was well focused, the display looked tack sharp, but the projectors I used for testing always left some areas of the presentation out of focus. This is much more disturbing when you are displaying a typical computer interface than when you are displaying photographic matter.
The manufacturer also suggests using a bright (3000 lumens or greater) projector. A complete LCD projector with built-in lamp and optics, rather than the LCD panel, might be a better choice if the quality of the overhead projectors available is not known. Proxima offers projectors with optional Cyclops interactive pointers as well, although there is both a weight and cost penalty to this approach.
Conceptually, the possibilities of this system are great for presentations, computer training, and traditional classroom use. The ability to modify a presentation moments before the lights dim might mean never apologizing for a misspelled word.
The combination of full color and the interactive pointers takes computer presentations to a new and important level. Although rather expensive for a single user, the price should not be an obstacle for corporate, training, and educational uses. Proxima's implementation of this system is complete, includes all the necessary cables and batteries, and shows a thorough understanding of the application.