Finally, a good HMD arrives

THERE HAVE BEEN a bunch of Head Mounted Displays (HMD) released over the past few years, from Eyetop to a handful of name brand and no name vendors at Computex. They all have one thing in common, an image that failed to be hugely bright or make you want to retire your monitor. The eMagin HMDs move things a lot closer to the 'I could really live with this' side of things.

There are two models, the Z800 and X800, the Z has a a head tracker and the X does not. Both have stereo 800*600 24-bit OLED displays. They make the panels themselves so the are designed for the device, and unique to eMagin. This gives them something that no other HMD I have used so far has, a bright, clear image.

This isn't to say it is perfect, I only had a few minutes to play around with it, and nothing to compare it to, but in my hazy memory, it is the best. Add in that the head tracker will allow you to pan around a virtual screen, and you have a potential winner.

Before I recommend it, I would need to spend a day a day with it, play with the accuracy of the tracking, and frame rate. That said, if you get the chance, try one out, it was a positive experience when I did. The Z800 is priced at $899, and there is also a cheaper single eye version called the Eyebud 800 meant for PDAs and game machines. This one has stereo earphones and a rechargeable battery, so it really is meant for mobile rather than tethered use.

Moving to the much more ordinary side of displays, we come to Viewsonic. They had two noteworthy things at their booth, a 37 inch LCD TV and 1 pound projector. The TV is part of a family, the NextVision 60 series of 32, 37 40 and 42 inch monitors.

They all support native 1080i, 1366*768, but will downsample 1080p. Since they use the latest Pixelworks chipset, the image is quite solid. There was no pixelization or visible gradients like I have seen with some other unnamed panels at the show. These also have SRS stereo speakers.

The nice part is they are priced a lot closer to those low rent models I mentioned earlier. The 37 inch N3760w is $1599, the N4060w 40 inch is $1999, and the 'little' 32 inch N3260w is only $1199. Last up we have the odd one out, the N4200w, it is bigger at 42 inches, but lacks the tuner of the -60 series parts. Without that, you save some cash, this one rings in at only $2299.

The most interesting thing on their stand is the upcoming 1.1 pound 1024*768 projector, it is simply dwarfed by the normal projector it was sitting on. While it may only be about 25 lumens, it will run off a battery pack, so not only is it portable, it will work with a laptop in places where power is non-existent. Expect a European launch in the not so distant future at about $799. They are going to wait a bit and remove some of the cost before a US launch, but if you all pester them, it may move that launch up a bit. You have your homework cut out for you, get mailing. µ