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E-Tech was formed in 1999 by former Electrohome dealer Tim Martin, who believed that existing retail home theater outlets lacked the knowledge and expertise to deliver film-quality images at affordable prices. E-Tech's mission is to deliver the highest quality results by offering new, custom-built and remanufactured projection equipment paired with cutting edge video sources to achieve the highest performance for the lowest cost, without compromising reliability. |
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Below is just a sample of the customers that we have done work for: |
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SGI |
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Daimler Chrysler |
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Ford Motor Company |
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General Motors Corporation |
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Lear Seigler |
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NASA/Lewis Research Center |
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The United States Air Force |
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Virginia Tech. |
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The University of Michigan |
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U.S. Dept. of Energy |
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So who is Electrohome and is the Marquee still being built? |
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Electrohome is a venerable eighty year old Canadian-based holding company that
started out making hand-crank phonographs back in the 20's. Their ability to
craft an entire machine led them into the furniture business, then the precision
electric motor business. At various times they made kitchen blenders, fans, mail
boxes, a whole galaxy of different products to keep their plant busy. They supplied
thousands of small precision electric motors to Rolls Royce for car air-conditioning
systems. Electrohome trended into electronics and small TV monitors, this led to
development of their first data projector, a monochrome green device that scanned to
24khz, the EDP56, around 1978. They experimented with dichroic optics in a projector
that combined three colors out to one lens, the reverse of a TV camera light path;
that reached the market as the ECP1000 around 1983. The one-lens configuration was
further refined in the ECP Graphics around 1986, which was Electrohome's first digital
chassis and was the foundation for models ECP3000 and ECP4000, where the dichroic
layout was abandoned in favor of three regular lenses. The company was publicly traded
on the Canadian stock market but majority ownership was held by the Pollock family,
whose other holdings included TV and radio stations as well. The CRT projection group
was staffed by some terrific engineering talent; this gifted team of designers introduced
the Marquee series of 8" and 9" CRT data projectors in 1992 at a dealer meeting in Toronto.
This team also developed some early DLP designs called the Vista series, and the Roadie
series which was optimized for rental and staging. The Pollock family saw that DLP digital
cinema was coming, but was reluctant to invest the millions needed for further development.
This led to the sale of the Projection Systems group to Christie in 1999, and Electrohome's
acquisition of a pioneering virtual reality systems integrator called FakeSpace Systems.
The Pollocks also bought out a FakeSpace competitor, Pyramid Systems Inc. of Southfield
Michigan, a VR integrator that I helped start in 1989. Pyramid had acquired rights from the
University of illinois to take two of their inventions to market; the CAVE cubic virtual e
nvironment, and the single-screen Immersadesk, a rear-projection 84" monitor configured
like a drafting table and equipped to display stereoscopic images with the help of lcd
shutter goggles. The CAVE and Immersadesk were the leading products of their kind among
university and corporate researchers everywhere. Christie was a maker of film cinema
projection equipment and was seen as a natural base from which to develop cinema DLP
systems; this focus led to their decision to sell the Marquee CRT program to Video
Display Corporation in October of 2001. The Marquee series is in active production today
in Florida at Video Display Corporation, which is very active in building flight simulators
and other display offerings for government and the military; they saw the value of having a
more advanced CRT chassis than the aging Ampro lineup, namely the Marquee platform. The
Marquee platform is the chassis of the Madrigal MP8 and MP9, and is also found under the
hood of the Vidikron Vision units. |
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Tim at E-Tech Systems Phoenix |
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