The 1999 Fenning Awards for technical achievement honored three diverse accomplishments that illustrate the broad range of technologies employed by today’s laser display companies. The awards honored a major breakthrough in laser technology, a new system for controlling laser and multimedia shows, and an innovative system for taking off-the-shelf video cameras and converting their images into a live laser display.

The Fenning Awards premiered in 1998, when ILDA renamed its award honoring new technologies and products to commemorate the late Fred Fenning, who pioneered laser display technology and standards during his 21-year career in the laser field.

1st Place: Lee Laser's Big Red Yag At the ILDA Conference in Orlando, the 1999 First Place Fenning Award went to Lee Laser, Inc. for their development of a 10-watt red YAG laser. Lee Laser, based in Orlando, has a history of producing YAG lasers that generate extremely high levels of power at the 532 nm green wavelength. A high-powered red-wavelength YAG for commercial uses, however, had yet to be developed. At the urging of many people in the laser display industry (particularly Greg Makhov of Lighting Systems Design, Inc) Lee investigated the possibility of producing a high-powered 660 nm red YAG.

Most laser display applications currently use krypton ion lasers to produce the color red, but Lee wanted to produce far more power than the typical ion laser and do so with all the advantages of a solid-state laser. Lee achieved this frequency by doubling the much weaker 1320 nm fundamental wavelength of the Nd:YAG crystal. The first public demonstration of the 10-Watt Red YAG Model 8100MQR/L was in April 1999 at an Orlando theme park. The model was formally introduced at the CLEO ’99 conference in Baltimore. Lee Laser: (+1) 407-812-4611



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