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The market of television displays is an area of outstanding economical importance due to its annual production volume of more than 100 million TV tubes. Fifteen million TV sets were produced in Western Europe in 1993 alone. On the other hand the materials used in the tubes and the energy consumption for production and during operation are issues of great ecological importance. It is therefore of social and political interest to achieve simpler and ecologically compatible solutions through new technologies and innovative technical concepts. Displays with a diagonal of one meter or more for TV and computer monitor applications operating in accordance with HDTV or higher formats require technology that is either not available or too costly. Conventional television tubes would not only have to be very large, the high internal pressure would entail an extraordinary mechanical stability of the tube, resulting in a notable increase in weight. Flat LC-displays present another alternative. Today as in the near future, only high performance color LCDs with relatively small physical dimensions are produced due to the complex technology involved. Furthermore, there are technical inadequacies when it comes to brightness and contrast in daylight or under oblique viewing angles. There are no solutions in the offing for these problems. A third possibility is the enlarged projection of pictures produced either by LCDs or similar techniques. In this case daylight projection can also pose problems due to the lack in definition and brightness. The most promising technique for a high brightness, high definition and large area displays are based on the direct projection with laser beams. Presently unsatisfying solutions are available for 2 basic parts of this technique: the low-cost laser sources needed for a color TV projection and the simple deflection system delivering the required number of pixels. There is a world-wide effort concerning the development of suitable light sources. We propose the development of a deflection system based on a novel simple electro-optical deflector fabricated in LiNbO3.
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