The Pocket-Sized Projector Has Arrived

mallumax writes "David Pogue of New York Times has reviewed Pico which is a pocket projector from Optoma. The review is quite entertaining (Pogue projects the images on to a plane's ceiling, leaving passengers baffled) and detailed. The highlights are: It is a pocket-sized projector which runs on batteries and can project images and videos from a variety of sources like iPhone, iPod and DVD players with a 480x320px resolution, with a maximum screen size of 65 inches at 8.5 feet. It uses a non-replaceable 10,000 hour LED lamp and a DLP chip from Texas Instruments. The battery lasts for 90 minutes and can be recharged through USB or with its own power chord. The device weighs 115g and comes with an inbuilt speaker which is practically useless. If you want one, it will set you back by $430."

AC/DC

Angus Young has already said he wants one. Something about it having its very own power chord, I guess.

Huh... Didn't the thing use lasers...

The Pico I remember used laser diodes, not just a LED light.

The lasers allow much greater efficiency - traditional projectors, like LCD Monitors, actually use more energy to display black, because it has to activate the cells to block light.

In this case, the lasers just shut off, reducing power usage to what's actually needed to make the image, not to make a full while screen all the time.

Re:Huh... Didn't the thing use lasers...

traditional projectors, like LCD Monitors, actually use more energy to display black, because it has to activate the cells to block light.

That may be true in LCD shutter technologies, such as an LCD monitor. This baby uses DLP technology, which is essentially a chip covered in tiny steerable mirrors. To produce black, they simply aim the mirror off-screen. It costs essentially no more energy to produce black vs any other color.

'nuf said

Or you can lie in bed and point the thing straight up. In a dark room, you'll have yourself a huge, bright movie playing on the ceiling.

Fun and Games

Pogue projects the images on to a plane's ceiling, leaving passengers baffled.

Then he spent some quality time with the Air Marshall and DHS ...

Its early for the technology

for those around here that remember 1998, the Rio PMP300 was the 2nd but the most important MP3 player that came on the market. Not exactly ripping it up at 32 MB of RAM but an important introduction nonetheless and ultimately led to Creative and then Apple following with their MP3 players. Given that, in 10 years we may all have them on our key chains next to the USB terabyte drives.

Baffled

"The people on the plane were baffled when they saw *porn* on the ceiling . ." and you thought cell phones were annoying when they came out . .

3M did it first.

3M makes and sells a very pocketable battery powered projector already. It has been for sale for a couple of months. Has better specs too, and it's cheaper. I'm not sure why we have articles that ignore stuff like this. I know we can't be experts on everything, but man, the author couldn't do a quick google search for pico projectors?
-Taylor

Re:

Yes, and I should also point out it's cheaper as well.

Talk about your feature creep

While vi became vim, this is a huge jump in functionality for Pico [wikipedia.org]

New Uses

This opens up entirely new uses for a projector for the nerdy crowd:

Some examples/ideas:
  * Projector tiling [64.233.169.104]
  * Cheap, portable 3D Scanning [ercim.org]
  * Real-time photo sharing (obvious)
  * Portable video-conferencing, telepresence (think projector-screen-like avatars around the screen with a tiny projector attached to each of them)
  * Pseudo-Invisibility!! (Think helmet-mounted camera, white t-shirt, dorky looking wearable projector mount)
  * Head-Mounted Projector applications (other types of invisibility, "Virtual Cockpit", freaking people out at night clubs, etc.)

9 lumens. 9.

When it goes on sale in two weeks, it will give parents a completely portable backseat-of-the-minivan movie theater for the kids.

Sure, provided you're driving at night, or with all the windows painted over.

Re:The lamp is non-replaceable?

It's a laser, so it should last like, 40 million hours or something. A tad longer than your average incandescent bulb.

Re:The lamp is non-replaceable?

It's an LED with an anticipated life of 20,000 hours. That's, like, a war-crime's amount of PowerPoint.

Can 'War Crime' be a unit of measurement for terribleness and quantity?

Re:The lamp is non-replaceable?

It sure is replaceable! Only $430!

Re:

That's not much more than the cost to replace my *replacable* lamp for my home theater projector. Which is rated for only about 3k-5k hours.

Re:The lamp is non-replaceable?

A non-replaceable lamp on an LCD projector? No thanks.

Given that its a "10,000 hour LED" it should last over a year of continuous use. At 8 hours a day every day it will last 3 years.

At more realistic (but still high) levels of usage... say, 4 hours 4 times per week, we're looking at 12 years.

In other words, you'll probably have upgraded multiple times before the bulb burns out.

Re:

Mod parent idiot. First, it's a DLP projector, not an LCD projector. Secondly, it has a rated lifespan of 10,000 hours. That's more than a complete year of life, or 13 years at 2 hours a day. Probably more than you'll actually want to use this projector.

Also, while I'm boarding on flamebait, I'd like to point and laugh at the person who replied to me a couple of days ago when I posted about this claiming this device didn't exist.

Re:The lamp is non-replaceable?

It's 20,000 hours. Short, but that's 250 8-hour days of continuous use.

Your math is off. 20,000 / 8 is 2500 8-hour days of continuous use, nearly 7 years.

Re:

Eh? I divided 20,000 by 24 and got 833 days of 24 hour continuous use. Which is really closer to six-plus years of life, even if you assume 8-hour days, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.

Re:

2500, I think you mean. If it died in less than a year, I'd be upset. 10 years is a lot better.

Re:

Thank you and god bless.

You had me until that part. Sorry, bro, no brownie points for you.

Re:

Poor form sir, poor form. What good is a paranoid rant without some mention of jew bankers, the international money cartel, black helicopters, and the plan to turn Mississippi into an al-quaeda training camp?

-1: discredit to the white race.

Re:does size matter?

Being able to carry one in your laptop bag for impromptu meetings is a key use. Having one to project the latest episode of [insert favorite show here] from your cell phone is one of those cool applications you buy it for, even though you'll probably never use it that way.

BTW - not every presentation occurs where there is a mounted projector. In the architecture field, for example, we often give presentations to smaller clients (churches, non-profits, individuals) in class or meeting rooms with nothing but a table, some chairs, and four white walls. These people don't have their "dream buildings" yet...which is why we're working with them.

Re:

Well, Mr. Gates, three meters is nine feet. Perhaps I'm mistaken in assuming that's nine feet diagonal as monitors are usually measured, but that's twice as big as my TV, which is over twice as big as any screen I've ever owned.

It doesn't say that the room has to be smaller than three meters; that's the maximum size of the projection.