Shazam! A Projector Is Shrunk

Come on, admit it: is there anything more awesome than miniaturization?

The Walkman put a stereo system in your pocket and changed the game forever. A modern digital watch has the computing power of a roomful of 1950s computer gear. And people are watching TV shows these days on iPods about the size of a business card.

Enormous feats of shrinkage like that don’t come along very often, though. So when they do, you sit up and take notice — as you will the first time you see the Optoma Pico Projector ($430 list price). It’s a long-awaited, much-rumored projector about the size of a cellphone: 2 by 4.1 by 0.7 inches, weighing 4.2 ounces.

A pocket projector? Are you kidding? This isn’t just a new product — it’s a whole new product category.

Regular projectors, of course, are big, heavy, expensive, sometimes noisy machines. They’re standard equipment in corporate boardrooms where PowerPoint jockeys hold sway, in classrooms or auditoriums, or mounted to the ceiling in home theaters, where they provide extra-large movie-watching goodness.

But there are lots of times when a 100-inch screen is overkill — and yet a 2-inch iPod screen doesn’t quite cut it. Those are the times when you need something in between. In those situations, a completely silent, ridiculously simple micro-projector like the Pico really shines.

You’d have to be a jaded gizmophile indeed not to be impressed the first time you turn on this tiny, shiny black box. In the center of the short end, there’s a very bright light-emitting-diode lamp. Inside, there’s a miniaturized Texas Instruments digital-light-processing (D.L.P.) chip, similar in principle to the ones that drive some full-size HDTV sets. Together, they produce an astonishingly bright, clear, vivid video or still image. That’s right — from a projector you’ve pulled from your jeans pocket.

There are no footnotes for that jeans-pocket statement, either (like, “not including enormous power brick”), because the Pico can run on battery power. Each charge lasts for about 90 minutes — longer if you use the lower brightness setting or when you’re playing video without sound. You can recharge the projector either from its power cord or from a computer’s USB jack. A spare battery comes with the projector, and so does a little drawstring carrying bag.

A pocket-size, self-contained projector changes all the rules. An iPod and a Pico — that’s the entire setup. Now, for the first time, a tent wall can become a movie screen when you’re out camping. (So much for roughing it.)

Now, let’s be clear: no pocket projector is going to produce as much brightness as tabletop projectors 10 times its size. The Pico manages 9 lumens (that’s how they measure the brightness of things like projectors), compared with, for example, 2,000 lumens for a $900 tabletop projector. That may not sound like much, but it’s plenty bright at the Pico’s shorter distances and smaller “screen” sizes.

The minimum distance for this projector is eight inches from your “screen”; the maximum is 8.5 feet away, at which point you get a 65-inch image. And it really, really helps if you dim the lights or use a properly reflective movie screen.

You can sit this little gizmo on your airplane tray table and project onto the seat back in front of you. (Yes, I tried it.) You get a dazzlingly bright, sharp, vivid video image about a foot across, so that you and your immediate seatmates can all watch.

(Or shine the projector onto the plane’s ceiling. The three-foot movie image completely baffles everyone within several rows; nobody can figure out where it’s coming from. I tried that, too. It was fun.)

CONTINUED : "Pixels are overrated"

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