Nera’s phone will rely on the new Inmarsat 3 satellites, which are larger and
more powerful than existing communications satellites. They also use spot beam
technology to focus the power of their transmitters on specific areas. This will
allow Inmarsat to cover 80 per cent of the Earth’s landmass with just two
satellites, because they need not “waste” power transmitting signals to the
middle of the oceans. Two of the new satellites are already flying, while two
more active and one backup satellite are due to be launched before the end of
1997.

Because of the power of the transmitters on the satellites, the phones
themselves can be relatively light and small. The WorldPhone weighs in at 2.3
kilograms, including batteries. It will cost under $4000 when it goes on
sale next month and calls will cost around $3 per minute. Other Inmarsat
M phones are likely to follow.

The WorldPhone is also easy to set up and use. It has its antenna in the lid
of the casing, and when the phone is switched on it searches for a signal. A
rising and falling tone guides the user to tilt the lid towards the strongest
satellite signal. The phone will not work if there is a building in the way.

The ultimate goal remains the pocket-sized handset, and three such satellite
phone systems—from Iridium, Globalstar and ICO—are due to come on
the market by 2000. Inmarsat reckons that its system will still be able to
compete, however, because Inmarsat M phones will by then be able to undercut its
rivals’ call charges.

Touch-sensitive computer screens have been available for some years,
but they are expensive, always need to be installed professionally and are
permanently fixed to the screen. However, Touchmate, developed by Visage
of Boston, is a slim box, roughly 35 centimetres square and just over 4
centimetres thick, which sits under a normal computer monitor. The monitor
stands on a top plate which is separated from the main part of the device
by springs.

When the monitor is touched, eight sensors in the device detect the
force the finger is applying to the screen. By analysing the rotating, tilting
and horizontal forces on the screen, the TouchMate calculates where it is
being touched and with how much pressure. Three accelerometers attached
to the base of the device detect any inadvertent motion of the table or
desk underneath so that this movement can be discounted.

To calibrate the device, the user simply pokes the side of the monitor
in various places and wobbles the table on which it stands. Visage claims
it is accurate to the nearest 0.6 of a millimetre and can detect 256 pressure
levels.

The device can be used with software packages that rely on graphic ‘icons’,
such as Microsoft Windows. The average finger may be a little too blunt
to select very small icons on screen, but with larger touch-screen targets,
such as those used in automated banking machines and information systems,
the system works faultlessly.

At £650, the Touchmate costs about the same as converting a 35-centimetre
monitor to touch-screen working. But it can handle screens up to 48 centimetres,
at which size a normal touch-sensitive screen would cost around £1000.
Also, it only takes about five minutes to set up. The British company Ellinor
is selling the devices in Britain and will soon manufacture them under
licence.

Grid, which pioneered a range of portable computers controlled with
a pen, last week launched what it claims is the world’s first ‘convertible’
computer that can be controlled by a pen or a keyboard.

When the computer is closed, a pressure-sensitive screen faces upwards
and responds to commands written with a stylus. Beneath the screen lies
a full-sized notebook computer keyboard. When the screen is up, it is possible
to type in information and use the pen system simultaneously.

Although the technology for the pen system and the notebook are both
tried and tested, Grid’s innovation has been to bring the parts together.
The Grid Convertible will cost £2700 and goes on sale early in 1993.

In today’s hand-held camcorders, there is not enough room for a conventional
colour cathode-ray tube. Most manufacturers resort to using liquid crystal
displays, as found in pocket TV sets, but at the tiny size required for
a viewfinder the resolution is very poor.

Mitsubishi’s solution is a miniature black and white cathode ray tube
with a spinning cone carrying red, green and blue filters in front of it.
Electronics in the viewfinder separate the parts of the picture signal that
carry the red, green and blue parts of the image.

These are displayed in quick succession on the screen in black and white.
The spinning cone is synchronised with the images, so the green part of
the image is viewed through the green filter, and the same for red and blue.
With 150 pictures sent to the cathode ray tube every second, the colours
blur into a true colour image.

The screen of Mitsubishi’s viewfinder has more than 450 000 picture
elements, or pixels. The best LCD colour screens for viewfinders have just
over 100 000 pixels.

Mitsubishi admits that it got the idea from a colour system developed
by the American television network CBS in the 1940s. Joseph Flaherty, senior
vice-president for technology at CBS, says that his company’s system was
the first to be approved for colour TV by the Federal Communications Commission.

The CBS system failed to catch on for two reasons. First, sending the
colours one after the other made it incompatible with existing black and
white TV sets. Secondly, when objects moved fast across the screen the colours
appeared to separate out. To avoid this separation the system needs to display
more than 120 images a second, which was not feasible at the time.

However, cameras based on this technique were built and Flaherty has
fond memories of them. ‘They never went out of alignment, and produced really
accurate colours. They were used widely commercially and the cameras used
on the first Moon landings also used this technique,’ he says.

The films would be scanned by HDTV telecine machine where the film image
would be turned into a digital signals. These would be transmitted at 70
megabits per second by satellite and received at cinemas throughout Western
Europe.

The spare capacity of soundtrack is such that the transmitted films
could be dubbed and subtitled in several languages, leaving cinema operators
to choose their language.

A dish with a diameter of about 3 metres would receive the signal, which
would relay the signal to the cinema by cable. A decoder would convert
it back to a colour signal which would then be fed into a 1250 line HDTV
projector.

At present the system will only be suitable for cinemas with up to 200
seats because of the limited light output of HDTV.

Eutelsat is carrying out a major study of the system’s economics. There
are huge savings to be made in the cost of physically distributing film
prints – which is particularly important for struggling smaller cinemas.
The system could also replace the projectionist thus reducing labour costs.
However, it has very high start-up costs and the price of a satellite transponder
could be some £2.3 million a year.

Another drawback is that all cinemas sharing a transponder would have
to start screening a film at the same time. Eutelsat says that some cinemas
may end up using some form of digital recorder to store the film and then
play it back at a time of their choosing. This would also allow them to
add local advertising.

While coding digital HDTV pictures, sending them by satellite to the
cinema and decoding them, are straight forward projecting the images is
far more difficult.

At the moment HDTV projectors use three high output cathode-ray tubes,
which must be carefully aligned and the images combined on the screen. To
get over the low output two projectors can be piggybacked, but the alignment
of the six beams becomes even more difficult.

At present the projectors have to be aligned manually. However, Seleco,
one of the companies Eutelsat is talking to, is confident that it can introduce
a projector within two years that can automatically maintain alignment.

Eutelsat is aiming the system initially at the French and the Italian
markets, which still have thriving film industries and where the cinemas
are mostly owned by a small number of film distributors.

A similar system was demonstrated in Hollywood last month. The film
Bugsy was transmitted from Sony’s high-definition studio by fibre optic
cable to a hall 200 kilometres away. The demonstrators used two double projector
systems to get sufficient light output. According to the organisers the
picture quality was ‘indistinguishable from film’.

Most office buildings are already wired up so that computers in them
can communicate with each other. IBM realised that this system, called a
local area network (LAN), works very well for transmitting television pictures
in much the same way as a coaxial cable from the aerial in the home does.

IBM’s new device, called an F-Coupler, works by utilising spare frequency
capacity in LANs. The digital signals for the computer data operate at faster
data rates than those used for TV and audio signals, so they use different
frequencies.

The F-Coupler will use a company’s existing LAN to carry up to 70 video
signals throughout a building without the need to install the expensive
coaxial cabling system usually needed for delivering video signals. IBM
claims its transmission of video over the LAN does not affect the ability
of the network to carry data.

The F-Coupler is a small box, costing just $100 in the US, that fits
onto a LAN socket on the office wall. From the box come two outlets. One
is for the normal LAN connection, while the other is a television signal
output.

IBM also announced this week a thin box that sits under the computer’s
monitor and turns it into a TV set. Known as the PS/2 TV, the device has
its own tuner so the TV signal can come direct from an antenna, cable system,
satellite or via an F-Coupler.

The picture generated by the PS/2 TV can be switched on or off or be
shrunk to a small box on the screen while the user carries on working normally.
What is more, the PS/2 TV can be used to originate signals to be distributed
over the LAN using F-Coupler. The PS/2 TV costs under $500. Both products
are currently only available in the US.

Sony’s head office in Japan says: ‘We are currently pursuing the development
of two minidisc portable models, one with record/playback capability and
one with only playback capability. It is too early at this stage to say
if both models will be ready on time for a joint introduction or if they
will be introduced separately.’

This appears to confirm that Sony plans to launch minidisc late next
year with portable machines which can only play back factory-pressed discs,
like miniature CDs, and will not offer machines which can record on blank
discs until the following year. So far all Sony’s demonstrations have been
of playback only.

Philips pledges that its digital compact cassette (DCC) system will
be launched in spring 1992 and will be able to record. ‘We have to be able
to record on the tape to demonstrate playback,’ says Philips.

Philips is now in a strong position to evaluate Sony’s chances of making
recording minidisc players. In a truce, both companies lent each other a
rival system for display at last week’s Funkausstellung consumer electronics
exhibition in Berlin. Neither company, however, showed either system to
the public. Philips sent Sony’s player straight to its research centre in
Eindhoven for technical evaluation.

Philips is gathering support from other companies for its DCC, most
recently Sanyo, Sharp and Yamaha. No manufacturer has yet agreed to make
versions of Sony’s minidisc.

Michael Dornemann, chairman of BMG which owns RCA, Ariola and Arista
Records, wrote privately to Michael Schulhof, president of Sony’s music
division, stating that ‘BMG needs more information on minidisc before we
can begin to consider marketing and manufacturing preparations.’

Philips has simply added a standard piece of computer software, called
a Postscript decoder, and some extra circuitry to the teletext circuits
of a television. Postscript is a software language used to define text and
graphics on a page and was originally designed for use with computer printers.

In the new system, the TV’s teletext decoder works normally until it
recognises Postscript code. It then uses Postscript processing to draw the
page on the screen. The software can generate images of any size, so it
can adapt to any size of screen. The picture quality will be better on modern
higher resolution TVs while still working on an older TV.

If a high-quality printer is attached to the TV, the original image
will be printed in the quality it was originally created, irrespective of
the quality of the TV screen.

At the Funkausstellung show in Berlin, images were being created on
a Macintosh computer and displayed on one of Philips’ new widescreen TVs.
The demonstration used the new D2-MAC TV format which the European Commission
is pushing as the standard for all future satellite TV broadcasting.

Philips considers D2-MAC particularly useful in this sort of data-intensive
work. Each D2-MAC TV signal can carry eight mono audio channels and a data
channel in addition to the TV picture. If less audio channels are needed
more data channels can be used.

The device has a tiny roller ball, like a ball bearing, hidden inside.
The ball is free to roll under gravity between a rectangle of infrared light
sources and sensors. When the ball rolls in front of one of the beams and
stops it reaching its sensor, this indicates that the device is tipped in
that direction. The position signal is translated into an infrared control
signal which is beamed at a TV set to move a cursor on the screen.

The viewer presses a button to display the cursor on screen and then
tilts the hand-held control from left to right, and up and down, to move
the cursor and select options from a menu.

Canon’s Ion camera records 50 images on a 5-centimetre magnetic floppy
computer disc. The images can then be displayed on a TV screen. Video printers,
which make copies of TV images, cost over Pounds sterling 1000 and the
picture quality does not justify the outlay for amateur photographers.

Canon hopes that by the end of 1992, over 1000 shops throughout Europe
will be offering the printing service. The shop printer is controlled by
a personal computer which allows the photographer to specify the framing
and cropping of the selected image. Each colour print takes about two minutes
to make, and costs around 75p.