Projection Summit in Las Vegas (107 degrees in the shade) is over for another year, with record attendance of over 330 people - and we have Dian Mecca, Adrienne Hefter and others to thank for all their hard work to make it succeed. One thing they helped organize was the Pico/Pocket projector showcase. There were a half-dozen projectors in the showcase, including the new pocket projectors from Samsung and LG, each 150 lumen and each using 0.55" SVGA DLP imagers.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

Both projectors looked pretty good, and they looked about the same, as could be expected. In these days when you can hardly buy a projector with less than 1500 lumens, it is hard to remember just how good 150 lumens can look, especially in subdued lighting. On the other hand, when you can buy a 2.4-pound, 1500-lumen projector for little more than what these 1.9-pound pocket projector costs, why worry about subdued lighting?

3M had three projectors in the showcase, two similar to the ones we saw at CES but the third had been built buy an unnamed OEM, for release later this year. Since it contained the same engine, the image produced by this OEM projector looked much like the 3M demonstration units.

Outside of the Pico/Pocket Showcase, Hans Stöhr showed off the Sypro/Jabil pico-projector with the HVGA DLP chip in it. Stöhr collected quite a crowd in a corner of the meeting room after the last session. This unit was a pre-production prototype and the final customer units are expected to be released either by the end of this year or Q1 next year, unfortunately probably not in time for Christmas. The prototype had 7 lumens and consumed 4 watts, producing a perfectly acceptable 12" image in the conference room. The production unit is expected to consume 3W (1.7W for the LEDs and 1.3W for everything else) and produce 12 Lumens. Like its larger cousins the DLP/LED-based pocket projectors from Samsung and LG, the demonstration unit had excellent color and contrast, with good resolution and no noticeable image artifacts. The Sypro/Jabil business plan is to build the finished unit, not just the imaging module. For $150 (in high volumes) they will put your brand name on it, pack it in your packaging and deliver it to the retail shop of your choice for sale.

bTendo also was not at the Showcase, but Gilles Rapp showed us their first demonstration unit in a suite at the Hilton. Their demonstration projector is based on two scanning mirrors and full-color laser illumination. As can be expected from an early prototype like this, the image had multiple artifacts and other image quality problems. Rapp explained the source of most of them and how they expect to solve them. I suspect some of these problems will be more intractable than Rapp realizes, but on the other hand, even they recognize it will take a while to turn the demonstration unit into a product. While the un-retouched photo in this article had only RGB binary colors, other images we saw had full gray scale.

There was a lot at Projection Summit besides pico- and pocket projectors, of course, since only one of the eight sessions dealt directly with small projectors. There were also two rooms full of other technology and product demonstrations. In addition, Projection Summit isn’t the only reason to be in Las Vegas in June: Infocomm starts today. Infocomm deals with professional A/V, i.e. big displays. This includes a large variety of projectors and other displays for A/V use and digital signage displays based on projection, LED direct view, LCD and Plasma. We will have more - stay tuned.