Small portable projector: what’s it for?

First let’s define what I mean by a portable projector: it’s the type of stand alone small projector or that’s integrated into a portable device. It’s the kind of product that focuses more on portability than performance, as the projected screen contrast and luminosity don’t match the one from a ‘regular’ projector.

Nowadays there aren’t many gadgets featuring projector functions but given the interest of users about them I think things will change in a few years. I myself thought at first that this is another marketing story to sell products but now I begin to believe there’s a real use for small portable projectors, that’s why I’ve scratched my head to find a list of possible usage scenarios for a small portable projector.

How could you use the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj digital camera with projector

The Nikon Coolpix S1000pj

The first comercial digital camera with integrated projector is the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj, which currently sells for 429 $ on Amazon. It’s not that cheap for a compact digital camera but given the included small portable projector I believe it’s a good bang for the buck producst.

So, what’s it for:

• after you take some pictures and videos you can show them to friends without having to hook up an LCD TV
• you can preview pictures and analyze them (even edit them a little through the camera’s functions) as a 20-30 inch projecter screen is always better than a 2-3 inch digital camera LCD

Now a little demo of the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj digital camera with integrated portable projector.

What could you do with the Samsung W7900 projector phone?

The first cellphone with integrated projector is the Samsung W7900, which hasn’t hit stores yet but was presented during CES 2009 and which uses a Texas Instruments pico projector.

What’s it for:

• as with a digital camera you can display pictures you took or other media files found on the phone
• you can watch youtube clips with it
• you can display bigger screens of websites you browse
• you can make presentations at meetings without resorting to big/dedicated equipment

Samsung W7900

Samsung W7900 video presentation

Dedicated small portable projectors

Optoma Pico projector

This are stand alone small projectors which function exactly as a ‘normal’ video projector but have small footprint. The Optoma Pico Projector is the first small portable projector to hit the market and can be bought from Amazon for around 230$. It cam project images up to 60 inch in diagonal and has a LED light source that can last over 20.000 hours of use, way longer than your regular video projector that has a lifespan of around a few thousand hours before you have to change the lamp.

The Optoma Pico Projector can be hooked up to almost any phone, use stand alone thanks to its 4GB of internal memory where you can store files or can be linked to your laptop’s VGA port and used as a secondary display. It even has a small 0.5 Watt speaker to head sound, but it won’t do fine in a noisy environment. There’s even an upgraded version of Optoma Pico Projector for 292$ that doubles contrast to 2000:1.

Let’s see the Optoma Pico Projector at work

As you can see there are a few uses of pico portable projectors but we still have to wait for them to become mainstream as at this point they don’t offer solid performance and come at a price, but hey, this is not something new as it happens with every new technology.