The advances made by notebook PCs and presentation packages are killing the use of overhead projectors. Angus Kidman looks at some of the new technology available for presenters.

Published in the Australian Financial Review, June 4 1997

The overhead projector is all but dead. Perched precariously on the edge of irrelevance for years, the growing popularity of notebook PCs and presentation packages has rendered it obsolete for any presenter seeking to make a real impact.

The future for presenters lies in the multimedia projector and the integrated conference room.

While PCs have long been used to create presentations, the first generations of presentation software were primarily focused on outputting overhead transparencies.

While computer-designed presentations were fast and flexible, printing them was often a process of trial-and-error.

Early electronic projection units were designed for a single purpose: taking an image from a computer screen and projecting it on to a wall or other display area.

While this eliminated the need to print overhead transparencies when presenting, many of these basic projection panels still work in conjunction with conventional overhead projectors, linking to a PC's display and then converting the image into a format ready for display on an OHP.

Demand for this style of projection system has remained steady, fuelled largely by the increasing use of notebook computers in professions such as sales and marketing and the relatively widespread use of overhead projectors within companies.

Vendors claim the market is growing at around 30 per cent a year.

Analyst Pacific Media estimates that the global market for projection systems exceeds $US1.3 billion and 300,000 units, and could top $US2 billion by the year 2000.

The leading worldwide brand is in Focus Systems, which has a 25 per cent market share, followed by Proxima with around 19 per cent.

While initial projection systems were large and clunky, modern units are often comparable in size to the PCs they connect to.

The display resolution of projectors has improved as well. Virtually all current projectors can now handle images of up to 640 by 480 pixels and 16.7 million colours - the same VGA resolution that is common to PCs.

Support for SuperVGA images of 800 by 600 pixels is also available on newer projectors, and many companies in the field are predicting that an even higher resolution of 1024 by 768 will be commonplace by the end of this year.

Virtually all these systems use active-matrix LCD technology to generate their images.

Projector systems also offer a greater flexibility than conventional overhead systems. Using remote pointing devices, presenters can control the flow of presentation pages without needing to access.

More advanced systems enable remote control of brightness and contrast. Some notebook PCs also include detachable screens that can double as projection panels.

The latest generation of projection systems offers much more than the simple ability to project an image from a computer screen on to a wall.

Multimedia projection systems that can project not only computer images but also video and audio from multiple sources, including videos, CDs and laser disks, have shrunk in size and cost.

Once solely the province of dedicated meeting rooms, they are now portable enough to be used by executives on the go, although price points of $10,000 or more are still typical.

These projection units are increasingly being designed to work independently of conventional overhead projectors, incorporating their own image projection technology.

Some also incorporate built-in disk drives, allowing presentations to be displayed without the need for a separate PC.

In a similar vein, projectors are succumbing to the inevitable and becoming tied into the Internet.

Projector firm Proxima last year announced an alliance with UK firm Diba to add Internet features to its product.

Proxima envisages the creation of a complete "meeting room device" that could be used to search the Internet for information as well as conventional projection duties.

Another spur to projector development has been the increasing popularity of digital cameras.

Polycom, for instance, last year released the ShowStation, a document conferencing system which can project documents directly from an attached camera to either an attached presentation PC or over a video-conferencing link.

Of course, such projector advances also place a new burden on presenters, who need to develop content that matches up to the potential of the technology.

That challenge is partly being met by presentations software that incorporates the ability to incorporate sound or video at the click of a mouse.

Such presentation packages have become commonplace in many corporate settings because of their inclusion in software suites.

Since launching its Office 97 suite - which includes the PowerPoint presentations package - earlier this year, Microsoft claims to have sold eight million licences for the package, with 70 per cent of US Fortune 1,000 companies adopting or examining the software.