Eidophor

An Eidophor was a television projector used to create theater-sized images.

Advances in projection television technology in the 1990s brought about the end of the Eidophor.

Thiemann was leading the Eidophor project from 1941 onwards.

He developed and patented the Eidophor technique of displaying television pictures the size of cinema screens.

Fischer invented the Eidophor video projection system.

The Eidophor was eighty times brighter than CRT projectors of the time.

It now had two lines of R&D: encryption devices and Eidophor, which still needed development to make it a viable product.

The Eidophor was a large and cumbersome device and not commonly used until there was a need for good quality large screen projection.

It was not until around the time of this article that Gretener took a lead in commercialising the Eidophor, following Fischer's death in 1947.

Projection display systems such as the now-obsolete Eidophor and Talaria have used variations of this approach as far back as the year 1940.

When Fischer died unexpectely in 1947, Thiemann and the Eidophor project were transferred to Gretener's company.

As his replacement, Hugo Thiemann continued the development of the Eidophor system at the ETH.

The optical system used in the Talaria line is a Schlieren optic like an Eidophor, but the color extraction is much more complex.

Dr. Edgar Gretener, his chief assistant at the ETH, was project leader for the development of Eidophor.

The name Eidophor is derived from the Greek word-roots 'eido' and 'phor' meaning 'image' and 'bearer' (carrier).

An original August 1952 magazine article in the Radio and Television News credits the development of the Eidophor to Dr Edgar Gretener.

Examples of the reflective LV type, are the Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), Eidophor's oil-film based system.

Between his undergraduate degree and beginning his graduate studies, he worked for one year in the Department of Industrial Research at ETH on the Eidophor large-scale display system.

There, he was assistant to Professor Fritz Fischer (physicist), known as the inventor of the Eidophor large-screen video projection system, at the Institute of Technical Physics.

After leaving academia, Thiemann was instrumental in industrializing and commercializing Eidophor while working for GRETAG, the successor company to Edgar Gretener AG.

After a lecture explaining the physics underlying the Eidophor system, Robert Oppenheimer offered him a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, NJ.

The idea for the original Eidophor was conceived in 1939 in Zurich by Dr Fritz Fischer and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology with the first prototype being unveiled in 1943.

After years of development, Eidophor achieved commercial success until Liquid Crystal Display LCD (another invention with important Swiss contributors) and Digital Light Processing DLP video projectors became available.

When the Eidophor project was transferred from the ETH to Dr. Edgar Gretener AG, a small Swiss company, he joined this company, which was founded by his former colleague Gretener.