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General Imaging’s iPico targets Apple Users

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We see more and more a redefined role for the pico projector as more manufacturers step up with their imaginative application for this technology. The iPico projector from General Imaging is not the first iPhone projector but it makes for a sleek and well rounded addition to the club started by Brookstone’s iPhone projector,  the Pop Video Projector,  and the Mili Pro V2 to name a few.

General Imaging’s ipico is a sleek hand-held, projector that sports a patented pop-up connector which will transform your iPhone or iPod touch into an instant social media tool wherever you are. Almost universal iPhone or iPod connectivity advances the iPico over its Brookstone forbears but likely, the brightness is going to be in the 15 -20 lumen range along with most other iPhone projectors with the exception of the updated 35 lumen Sanwa 400-PRJ011.  The ipico is capable of projecting a maximum screen size of 50″, where it will come in white this holiday season for $129.99 a pop making it one of the most affordable iPhone pico projectors we have seen to date.

 

Sanwa’s iPhone projector gets an Update!

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Japanese Electronics manufacturer, Sanwa has revamped the PRJ011 iPhone charging sleeve-cum-pico-projector. The new PRJ016 packs a 1,850mAh battery that can recharge your handset up to 80 percent and also power the projection mode if you want to enjoy a movie, or a spreadsheet, blown onto your wall. The 35 lumens DLP device has three times the brightness of its predecessor, can project for 120 minutes on a full tank and has a maximum display size of 60-inches, focusing from a distance of up to six feet. It’s available in Japan starting today, with pricing set at ¥23,800 ($305). More and more are we seeing traction on the iPhone sleeve.

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AAXA P4 – X : Editor’s Choice for PC Mag

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AAXA P4 - X
Pico Projector AAXA P4 - X

The P4 – X has been released as a replacement to the P4, and seems to be gaining considerable fanfare. Considering that the original P4 that did it all (Windows CE, PDF viewer as well as productivity suite with Office, Excel, and Powerpoint) has now been slimmed down from everything from features to pricing, we never would have guessed that in doing so it would have become a contender for best multimedia pico projector. We’re currently waiting on a demo unit to test out the newly added HDMI as well as the improvised features such as low fan noise and better button response.

PC Mag did a review piece on the the exceptional new pocket projector:

“…It’s both highly portable and highly capable, with a bright image, good image quality, lots of connection options, and the ability to read files from memory, a combination that makes it Editors’ Choice.”

A couple of talking points the reviewer found where the brightness, while low in lumen count, displayed vibrant and sharp pictures in agreeable settings while keeping the ‘rainbow effect’ that DLP imagers posses to a minimum. Lauded for it’s light weight and easy set up, the expandable memory as well as quick set up time pushed this projector past the Optoma PK 301 (which is also $400 street price) in terms of features, pricing, and over all quality.

We’re excited to put this projector through the gauntlet and look forward to putting a review in front of you.

[Via PC Mag]

Intersil India bets big on Pico Projectors

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Intersil-India now has expanded their office to serve the future expansion of Intersil India. The new 18000 square feet office can house close to 100 engineers. It houses development office, marketing and product test lab. A former employee at Texas Instruments, Ramanujam Thodur is the Managing Director of Intersil India.

Intersil is pinning high hope on pico projector. Where Intersil has developed pico projector technology using green laser with auto focus feature. Main stream availability of pico projector is expected in 2015, as per Susan. Intersil bets that its pico projector technology is more reliable and less expensive compared to the present pico-projector technology.

Intersil follows what called asset-lite, an other name for fab-lite where it gets its power management ICs fabricated by semiconductor foundry service providers. However it has strong manufacturing expertise in bringing high-rel chips to withstand harsh weather conditions in applications such as aero-space and military.

Intersil’s op-amps and other analog front end chips are used widely in India for the performance as well as cost advantage. Who knows, maybe by 2015 this can be a game changer for the US market. Only time will tell.

Buckingham Palace Projector sets New Guinness World Record

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London, England – London UK based projection artist Ross Ashton of The Projection Studio had his ‘Face Britain’ video projection work onto the front of Buckingham Palace officially confirmed as a Guinness World Record for the ‘most artists working on the same art installation’.

The work – using Buckingham Palace as the canvas – employed an array of projectors which was assembled around the Royal palace to project video artwork featuring 32 animated mosaic portraits of the Queen onto the unique projector screen. The work’s main participants were Ross Ashton of The Projection Studio, The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts and involved the artwork of more than 200,000 children.

All these portraits have been carefully scrutinised by Guinness World Records and certified as individual artworks.

For the show, the component images all ‘flew’ together to make the individual portraits of The Queen, which were based on a template image supplied by Royal photographer, Arthur Edwards

Says Ashton, “Obviously I’m extremely proud of this land-mark achievement. It was a big challenge and a lot of fun working on the project, with an incredible response from children and young people nationwide who really engaged with the concept. It was hugely inspiring to deliver a work based on all their original contributions.”

Children aged 4 – 16 were invited to produce their own self-portraits by Face Britain encompassing all levels of skill and in any medium, including drawing, photography, textiles, painting and graphics.

Ashton worked closely with CT’s Scott Burgess to design the projection system and CT supplied all the hardware for the installation, including the 24 Barco and Panasonic projectors, complete with weatherised hides and crew.

The show ran for three evenings at the end of April and attracted massive public interest. For more projection art- check out our post on the Speed of Light!

 

Smartphone Growth Driving Pico Projector Demand

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Just today I watched a movie off my phone, browsed the web, and shared some pictures off my tiny little phone. Unfortunately it was a bit cramped, and I am thankful at these times for my pico projector. It’s easy to carry, it’s easy to set up, and all the inputs needed to share media are easy to get to. Smartphones are definitely the brain behind the projectors currently with all their technology to receive and send information.

According to GBI Research, the global demand for smartphone technology will help steer the growth of the pico projector market. This seems to be the general consensus within the industry as more and more projectors come made for iPhone or dock with other kinds of phones. The truth is that it just makes sense for these products to help drive each others sales as they compliment each other for the obvious reasons of screens being limited to their design. Take a look at the Galaxy Note, an effort to increase the overall surface area of the screen has forced the phone to take an almost opposite turn for overall usefulness.

The report also goes to point that the current market value for 2011 was $0.49 Billion and is expected to increase to $8.12 billion by 2016. This a growth rate, yearly, of 75% which is not a small margin.

 

The Theory: Smallest Car Chase ever with Microvision Pico Projector

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Speed of Light / aka / The World’s Tiniest Police Chase from The Theory on Vimeo.

 

Interesting video I saw just a couple days ago. There were shots fired, cars blowing up, and an escaped convict who manages to score himself a Ford GT. The most impressive part? This video was filmed entirely using a pico projector, the Microvision Showwx+. Surprisingly you wouldn’t think that in the lighting these guys were filming at you would actually see anything but the picture is very clear and very sharp.

The Theory has put together a new video on their Vimeo channel. A small and experimental video take of a car chase unfolding ontop of a desk, through a hallway, and into a storage area. Definitely a must see little film, even the little ones might want to peek. The best part is that you can get a very nice handle on what the pico projector market is really going to be doing soon enough…holograms maybe?

The most impressive part is that the Microvision still looks pretty good after all this time. Most definitely a great piece to show off the laser technology inside the pico projector. You can see the strengths of laser in this video, not only is it a vibrant detailed picture, but no focusing needed. That is probably the coolest thing about the laser technology.

And the lasers, those are cool too.

Pocket Pico Projector Round-up: iPod Docks

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There’s been an outcrop of new pico projectors with docking abilities. It makes you wonder though where the market is for these kinds of products. Pico Projectors tend to be targeted towards business users who are either implementing the product into their presentations or into their business (think I.T. applications). This new emerging market is the casual consumer who might be looking for a way to extend his phones limited phone space.

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First the $100 ‘PoP’ Pico Projector at 10 lumens and a pretty low price tag you can’t really go wrong if this is the kind of technology you’re trying to get a hold of.The lumen rating is on the low side but it’s not entirely bad. It fits generation 3G all the way to the 4S and projects a qHD native resolution of 960×540, the same resolution the Iphone pushes out. Rechargable and cheap, PoP seems like a good product to look into on the lower end.

On the pricer side of things; the Brookstone Pico Projector retails at a steep $229.00 price tag offers the same amount of lumens but offers to charge your phone while it’s docked. This could serve as a nice addition to someone looking to just expand their feature set a bit without killing the battery for projection and it still manages to outlast the PoP Pico Projector by 30 minutes for a grand total of 2 and a half hours of continous run/charge time.

Both these units unfortunately don’t have a very high count in the lumen range (Approximately between 10-15 respectively). This does leave room for more advanced projectors. Aiptek recently showcased new pico projectors made for the Iphone/Android market and to top it off their new MobileCinema line is boasting an alleged 35 lumens on an DLP engine that if it claims to hit 35, could very well attract a ton of new buyers.

ACER C120 – Laptop Companion Only?

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Acer hit the ground running with the Ultrabooks. Unfortunately for that market the Ultrabooks are just not making as much of a buzz as some people were hoping(looking at you intel) but in an effort to either pull users in with ultra portability, or to make up for the terrible backlit LED on the Acer S3, Acer has put out the brand new Acer C120. A very affordable($269) 100-lumen pico projector. Now we’re the Micro Projector experts and we can tell you that the projectors in this lumen range are usually upwards of $300.  So you are getting a very significant amount of power for the price.

Not everything is gold though. One USB 3.0 input only. Now I understand that cutting costs sometimes involves cutting features but I mean really where is your projector going to come in handy when you can only use it with another 3.0 enabled device. So if they were realllly trying to target the Ultrabook community with Ultra portability, they would have made the S3 USB 3.0 enabled, unfortunately that is not the case.

Surprisingly enough the only other competitor in this market is the surprisingly new AAXA P4 Wi-Fi that surprisingly has too disappeared. With 100 lumen light engine and multiple inputs/outputs for most modern day video-out capable devices, it’s a shame you don’t hear much from this competitor only released 2 weeks ago.

 

You can read more about the Acer C120 at it’s home Acer.com

AAXA Let’s Out New 720p HDMI Enabled P4

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Currently out on the market there are a couple HDMI enabled pico projectors. Between the AAXA P3 and the Optoma 320 there isn’t much left in the sub-$300 over 50 lumen category. Enter the AAXA P4 – X, a refreshed 720p HDMI enabled projector at 80 lumens.

Originally we had taken a look at the P4 before and thought that while it was a very adequate projector with an even better pricing model, it did indeed lack the definition and digital output that so many people are looking for. The new P4 – X is a revised P4 with a couple new bells and whistles and we couldn’t be more excited to get our hands on it. It comes with the usual inputs that the P4 packed which was VGA, Composite, USB with the addition of the new mini-HDMI port. Unfortunately this version seems geared to people looking to expand their media sharing abilities as the P4 – X loses it’s productivity package embedded into the system as well as the Windows CE operating system. Of course these options are more geared towards the business minded user looking to update and present Microsoft Office files.

The P4 is truly a portable projector as it sits as the thinnest projector that fits comfortably in a pocket and even better in a laptop bag or purse. At 5.6” long, 2.7” wide, and 1.2” tall you can be assured this tiny projector can definitely fit into most bags so can always carry a cinema experience ready to roll out.

Definitely a step forward in attracting the media friendly user, although the exclusion of Windows CE might turn off business oriented users, the lower price point and HDMI with a high resolution has me thinking about Angry Birds SPACE on a 60” screen.

 

AAXA P4 – X Available for pre-order direct from AAXA