8 Mar
2007
8 Mar
'07
5:15 p.m.
--- David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
Somehow I got subscribed to an optics catalog. This
got me to thinking.
How hard would it be to cause a laser beam to sweep
with the speed and
accuracy to be a substitute for a CRT? The upshot?
Take an old terminal
with nasty screen burn. Cut off the gun end of the
bottle, clean off the
old phosphor. Apply new phosphor of some kind, then
mount the laser
rasteriser where the old gun was. Projecting raster
images on the side of
a building would be fun too.
That would be pretty cool. The easy part would be to
pulse the laser with the video signal. I have no idea
how one would be able to conveniently scan the laser
across any kind of surface. The electron gun in a CRT
is magnetically deflected. A laser, being totally
optic, would neesd to be mechanically or reflectively
deflected. Also, due to the nasty "laser-ness" of a
laser, I definitely wouldn't want to be in front of a
computer terminal retrofitted with a laser diode. For
projection, however, it would be a neat hack. You'd
have to devise some sort of system of spinning
mirrors, like in the scanner of a laser printer. Maybe
a spinning mirror and a spinning lens...
-Ian