Take A Little Media System on The Road.

Technology gets smaller every day.  I just looked at a pocket projector that uses a laser and LED with a DLP chip.  This little projector had only a USB input and power input.  The battery ran for the entire 30 minute demo making it clearly good enough for most sales calls.

Here is where I was blown away.  The guy plugged in his iPhone with a USB cable and put on bluetooth stereo headphones.  Here this guy is with really good sound and a pretty good 30” picture on the wall.  What a great option for hotel living road warriors  You can watch all kinds of On Demand Video or ODV over the Internet and not get stuck on the little iPhone screen.


With ODV growing at such a rapid pace, this seems like the no-brainer solution for any road warrior.  Just plug in your smart phone, put on your headsets and catch up with the news, the highlights of your favorite shows or even catch a movie on Netflix.  Yup, there is an app for that.  Mobitv is out too so you can catch up on your TV shows.  No more channel surfing lame hotel channels.

The ability to walk into any room, dim the lights and have a 30, 40 or even a 50” picture on the wall using a projector that is not much larger than your iPhone or Blackberry Storm is pretty impressive.  The least expensive models of course put out the lowest light, as little as 7 lumens.  The better LED and LED/laser models are as high as 20 Lumens for under $600 and there is rumor of a 50 lumen version on the horizon.

Given that my Runco Projector is very conservatively rated at 1500 ANSI lumens, buying a projector that is rated at 20 ANSI lumens is a little unnerving.  It won't get the black levels of the Runco but keep in mind that the light needed to create a picture is a function of screen area, not screen width.  A 30” wide screen is only 500 square inches and a 60” wide screen is 2025 Inches.  The 60” is more than four times larger and therefore requires four times the light energy (lumens).  At 120 inches, the screen in my home theater is 9500 square inches or 19 times larger in square inches.  Because the projector is farther from the screen and the optics are more complex, the Runco needs more power.

Simple color presentations and cartoons will look pretty good on the little projectors up to about a 60”diagonal picture.  If you are going to watch the suit detail in Men In Black, forget it.  If you want to catch up on The Family Guy or show a quick power point this might be just the ticket.

The little pocket projectors are no home theater replacement projectors but they sure can be cool for a quick sales presentation or a little ODV on the go.