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The Magic Lantern
The Magic lantern was one of the earliest recorded functional projectors in history.These lanterns conveyed images printed on glass slides in which oil lamps and candles served as light sources for the projection. -
The Filmstrip Projector
Filmstrips were used to show educational films in classrooms, serving as a predecessor of videocassettes, DVDs and Blu-ray technology. The teacher could turn a knob on the side in order to pause any image being presented. This was leaps and bounds ahead of the Magic lantern since it was no longer reliant on oil lamps and candles, but instead a light bulb illuminating through a printed slide. -
The Opaque Projector
The opaque projector allows the user to project printed material or small objects without having to convert them to another medium unlike the film strip projector. In use for nearly sixty years, the opaque projector projects the object by shining a bright lamp on the material to be viewed and directing the reflected light through a projection lens. -
The Slide Projector
Unlike opaque projectors, slide projectors require that the presented material be transferred to a 35mm slide allowing the user to project virtually anything that can be can put on film. The first patented slide projector was created by Kodak in the 1950s. -
The Overhead Projector
The overhead projector followed the slide projector due to the innovation of a printed transparent sheet that could be placed on the overheads source of light. The transparent sheet then would be placed on an overhead projector and then would be conveyed onto a wall or screen using the lamp and optics that are built into the projector. -
Digital Projection Panels
The digital projection panel consisted of a large LCD, electronics, cooling fan, and a plastic or metal enclosure with a glass plate on both sides of the LCD. It bascially consisted of an electrical sheet incased in the hard shell of the projector, and could be plugged into a computer in order to convey any image. This excelled past the expectations of the overhead projector since the boundaries of what could be projected on this device was at the time unlimited. -
The Home Theater (LCD) Projector
LCD (liquid- crystal display) projectors projected a light beam from a metal halide lamp that passes through a special kind of prism that contains liquid crystals to help control and direct the intense light beam supplied by the metal halide lamp. This surpassed the digital projector by provding video in higher quality and better display. -
The Computer Projector
The computer projector essentially combined the overhead projector and the digital projection panel into one device making it considerably smaller and more easily transported. The main difference is that it was the first fully integrated digital data projector that was compatible with most computers. -
The Video Projector
A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image on a projection screen using a lens system. When they were first innovated in the early 1990s, quality and visibility was bad, but as models continued to be patented by companies, they became widely used despite their weight and poor transportablitiy. -
The Multimedia Projector
A multimedia projector is a compact, high resolution, full-color projector capable of projecting text, images, video and audio content at a much more capable rate then the first models of the LCD projector. Typically the projector will feature inputs for a computer, DVD player, VCR, CD player and storage device. Future innovations of the projector are based off of this ground-breaking design. -
The Pocket Projector
Created by Mitsubishi, the new pocket projectors were small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.Their light source is a cluster of LEDs and most of them can be plugged into a wall outlet or powered by battery.This excels passed previous projector models simply due to its extreme efficiency in transportability and its high quality.
