Miniature Gadgets - Optoma Pico Pocket projector
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Once you’ve captured your espionage footage on the Spypen, you’ll presumably need some way of showing it to your spymasters. This is where the Optoma Pico PK101 Pocket Projector comes in. Optoma is an award-winning manufacturer of professional projectors and has a reputation to match, so you would expect the Pico to be a quality product rather than a gimmick. Even so, it is an impressive achievement to pack so much projection power into a device that literally fits in a trouser pocket and looks more like an MP3 player or cell phone.
To make the Pico possible, Optoma has cast aside the projection rulebook in favor of a more radical approach. For example, to maximize portability, the device’s power is supplied by a 2-hour internal rechargeable battery rather than the traditional mains adaptor. Optoma thoughtfully provides two batteries in the box, to give up to a sensible four hours of projection time between charges.
This impressive power management is achieved through the use of an LED lamp rather than a standard bulb. The lamp has two operating modes: in dark conditions, standard mode will help to extend battery life, while bright mode will cast a stronger image in less favorable environments. The lamp itself is built to last, with an expected life of 20,000 hours, or an astonishing 18 years at three hours use per day.
Although the image quality it produces is significantly inferior to that of a typical full-sized projector, it is still more than satisfactory. To give you some idea of its abilities, the Pico can project a 60” image at a maximum distance of 2.6 meters, or just under 10 feet. It boasts a contrast ratio of 1000:1 at 9 lumens, which is on the low side for a bright room, but will do fine in the dark.
This is all powered by a Texas Instruments chip that uses the same DLP technology as can be found at the heart of top-of-the-range digital cinema projection systems and HDTV sets. DLP – Digital Light Processing – uses advanced semiconductors equipped with millions of tiny mirrors to reflect and manipulate digital image code. It is one of the technologies that has made high resolution digital video possible and, as the Pico shows, it also has the power to drive the miniaturization of video hardware.
Next: Connectivity for the Pico >>
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