Would you pay £4,000+ for the best TV ever? Mitsubishi is hoping so, but just can’t make up its mind whether to launch its Home Cinema Laser Display in Europe. We do hope it does.Our extended demo with this very special display proved one thing: rear projection TVs are brilliant, and – thanks to lasers – approaching a position where the achievable size and, crucially, picture quality advantages over both plasma and LCD (and that includes LED backlit variants) are significant enough to attract the high rollers after a slice movie perfection. We knew this would happen. Just a few [...]

Continue Reading...

If you own an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), here’s piece of advice: don’t fly it near San Nicholas Island, California, or it could be blasted out of the sky – by a laser. Two such vehicles were successfully shot down there on May 24th by a US Navy laser weapon. According to the official press release, this marks “the first detect-thru-engage laser shoot-down of a threat representative target in an over-the-water, combat representative scenario.” Members of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) utilized a laser shot through a beam director on a KINETO tracking mount, controlled [...]

Continue Reading...

A collaboration between Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo achieved a record 25Gbps data communication link using quantum dot laser, a low-cost technology that can reliably handle high-speed data transmissions while consuming minimal power. With good performance and wide margins for further improvement, this development paves the way to the next generation of high-speed Ethernet data communications, which will see a tenfold increase in transfer speed. As the video sharing and cloud computing phenomena keep inflating our need for speed, engineers urgently need solutions to keep pace with [...]

Continue Reading...

This Sunday will mark the 50th anniversary of the laser. The world’s first functional laser sent out its initial pulses on May 16th back in 1960, where Theodore Maiman (pictured above), showed off the technology at the Hughes Research Laboratories. While Maiman is known as the father of the laser for being the first to realize one, he actually wasn’t awarded the patent for the technology — that went to Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow of Bell Labs who, in 1958, published a paper detailing the work they themselves did on realizing a working laser without having built one. The laser [...]

Continue Reading...

Hats off to Russian designer and crazy keyboard creator Art Lebedev: He’s created a clock unlike any other. Reflectius is an ingenious design concept that uses one laser and 60 rotating mirrors, all reflecting from a single laser beam into the shapes of numbers. Brilliant. The clock’s case, which Lebedev calls “a complex triangulated surface that reminds of the complicated trajectory the beam of light travels in no time,” is just as inventive as the laser paraphernalia within. Will there be a tiny bit of smoke wafting among these mirrors, making those laser beams show [...]

Continue Reading...

Boeing straight-up stepped out of our dreams and into our hearts with its 747-mounted airborne laser designed to shoot down ballistic missiles. A project we once feared to be dead, not only is the airborne laser very much alive, but now there’s even a video of the whole thing. From our previous coverage: For the first time ever, an airborne laser weapon mounted aboard a Boeing 747-400F blew up a sea-launched liquid-fueled ballistic missile. The light-speed laser beam shot “directed energy” from the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB), consisting of a Northrop Grumman higher-energy [...]

Continue Reading...