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 whole 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. It’s a long-awaited, much-rumored projector about the size of a cell phone: 2 by 4.1 by 0.7 inches (5 by 10 by 2 centimeters), weighing 4.2 ounces, or 119 grams. Its list price is $430. It premiered at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin in late August and it will be available in electronics stores worldwide later this month.
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 are 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 microprojector like the Pico really shines.
You would have to be a jaded gizmophile not to be impressed the first time you turn on this tiny, shiny black box. In the center of one end, there is a very bright LED lamp. Inside, there is a miniaturized Texas Instruments digital light-processing,…