BOSTON, March 30 – A startup company named SCRAM Technologies Inc. announced the development of projection screen technology that it claims will enhance projector quality while lowering cost. The SCRAMscreen is a passive display capable of using any light source, a spokesperson for the company said.
    The company, located in Dunkirk, Md., which holds an exclusive license on technology developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory, will give its first public demo of a 50-inch-diagonal prototype display at the DisplaySearch FPD Conference & High Resolution Symposium in Austin, Texas. Samsung (Seoul, South Korea) will demonstrate a 50-inch display based on the scheme at the CeBIT trade show, which convenes March 22 in Hannover, Germany.
    "The contrast, color saturation and viewing angles were better than any other TV image I've seen on a large screen," said DisplaySearch analyst Mark Fihn, who viewed an early prototype late last year. "The SCRAM screen has the potential to be a breakthrough innovation."
    The SCRAM technology combines a lens that compresses a projected image and a screen that decompresses it, achieving what SCRAM Technologies' CEO Ray Kwong called "the holy grail of displays: a fairly thin form factor with extraordinary contrast. The screen consists of many layers of optical waveguides," Kwong explained. "The core material of the layers has a particular index of refraction, and the coating has a slightly lower index, so we achieve total internal reflection. That's significantly different from other screens, which have to bulldoze an image through with more light. We capture as much light at the output as we have at the input and achieve very high contrast."