Powering Down

Sometime between the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and Earth Day this past April, America’s environmental IQ took a dramatic turn. Now, everywhere you look, individuals, companies and even entire industries are going green. It’s an extremely worthy shared goal (sustaining the planet and the human race) but a much trickier production for our industry, tethered as it is to all those plugs in the wall.

How can you help? You can start by swapping out the incandescent bulbs in your studio with compact fluorescent bulbs. CFLs use less power and last much longer, sometimes five to seven years. Small steps, but not inconsequential if you think of it the way Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen do in The Green Book: "If everyone in the U.S. replaced just five incandescent bulbs, we’d keep one trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of the air." That’s a significant contribution.

Powering down the rest of your gear will be harder to do, but advancing technology will help. LED-based lights and panels- just as bright, without all the heat- are already a major part of video and lighting kits. Some say the technology could replace CFL bulbs in the near future.

It’s also encouraging to learn that flat-panel displays, popular for a variety of practical and stylistic reasons, are also much more energy efficient than earlier CRT models. LCD displays, in fact, consume about half the power that plasma displays do. But in many cases, projectors consume even less. So could a projector’s inherent green appeal give this perennial display device new value in an increasingly flat-panel world? I think it just might.

Unfortunately, we won’t hear much about the comparative environmental benefits of projectors vs. flat-panel displays, especially from companies that sell both. If power consumption is important to you, you’ll need to do your homework. Compare yearly wattages in spec sheets online or ask your dealer to get those figures for you. And even if you can’t nail down wattages, pay attention to technology that monitors power consumption for you, such as the "Eco-Mode" and "AmbiBright" features in NEC’s Professional 90 series of projectors. Beyond power efficiency, look for lead-free components and trade-in and recycling programs that will keep the toxins in our landfills from reaching catastrophic proportions.

There are plenty of other compelling reasons to invest in a projector right now and David English’s report on page 24 gives you plenty of models to consider. You may just find that what’s good for the environment is also good for your wallet.