Slashdot Mirror
Mitsubishi LED Projector: Small, Cheap, Durable
mcaycedo writes "This new projector is my top number 1 "must have" gadget. The reasons: price (US$699), size (fit in your hand), convenience (uses AC, batteries, card adaptor) and duration (lamp life:20000 hours). The cons: only SVGA (800x600), lumens (N/A)" There are tons of applications for a LED projector of this size, too: in cars, integrated into portable video players, information displays of all kinds ... and as resolution and brightness improve, even more will emerge.
"only SVGA (800x600)"
My 80486DX4 is only VGA (640x480), you insensitive clod!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Mitsubishi Launches Mini DLP PocketProjector
by David Chait [Theater, Mobile] Tuesday, February 08th, 2005
If you've always wanted a front projector that you could take with you anywhere, the upcoming PocketProjector from Mitsubishi might just be what you've dreamed of.
Mitsubishi PocketProjector in hand
Certainly rating as one of the smallest projection units out there, the new Mitsubishi PocketProjector is a tiny 14oz powerhouse of a projector. A unit small enough to fit in your hand, run off batteries or car adapter, yet create a 20 screen with only one foot of throw.
Mitsubishi PocketProjector A/V Jacks
The PocketProjector can drive 800x600 SVGA resolution through its Lumileds tri-LED DLP system, rated at over 20,000 hours of lamp life. And it sports composite, s-video, and VGA connectors, great for visualizing anything from a laptop presentation to a portable DVD player. Heck, with a digital camera that has AV output, you can set up a virtual slide show no matter where you are - well, so long as you have a clean, flat, white surface to project onto. ; )
Mitsubishi PocketProjector Next to Cell Phone
The PocketProjector will be available in July at an SRP of $699 US - not cheap certainly, but a fair price for an SVGA projector with multiple inputs, multiple portable power solutions, and that is pocketable. They'll also be selling battery packs for the unit, plus 'solutions' of cables/etc. for different users/industries. Hopefully as soon as they're ready, we'll get one in for testing. I know a LOT of people who'd jump at a mini projector like this...
Here is a mirror http://mirrordot.org/stories/94956edfe592d87195c41 25ea9151084/index.html
until someone ports NetBSD to it?
I'm guessing that Lumens (N/A) is a possible con because it isn't listed. It has to use light, its an L.E.D. (Light Emmiting Diode).
I think it simply means that it hasn't been tested for light output in the unit of Lumens
~Eric
It's nice to see projectors finally coming down in price. The lowest price used to be the 2200MP Multimedia Projector for $899. Hopefully we will see more in the lower price range and maybe even under $500. The smaller size is definately a plus.
Browse the Information Directory
Lumens is a reference to the brightness of the image. I'm assuming (N/A) means they have no specific number for it, but IIRC 2000 is an average projector.
I got to read the first page of the article. It is pretty impressive. I didn't get to the dirty details but I'm pretty sure this uses three of TI's DLP chips. I have seen this sort of thing coming for a while now; the DLP chip is truly a technology marvel.
Now, as far as the Lumens are concerned... Lumens are a way to measure the light which is isotropically radiated from a given source. A projector doesn't isotropically radiate though, its emission is highly directional. For this reason, lumens are a very crappy way of defining, technically, the "brightness" of a projector. But, since people are used to buying lightbulbs according to the market-ese of Lumens, that's how Projectors are rated as well. Since the projector uses LEDs (Luxeons, from the sound of it) as the light source, I suppose that's why they're lacking a fancy lumen number to throw around: because LEDs, as highly directional light sources, are measured in Candles (abbreviated "cd" or millicandles as "mcd") and not measured in Lumens.
They'll probably make up a marketable number before too long, fret not.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Yeah yeah, when they first came out they were mainly used by rich people with laptops doing cheesy sales pitches. But nowadays I expect everywhere I present to have a projecter already set up, so I don't care about size, weight or running of batteries. Why is it that I'm forced to pay for features I don't want?
I suppose there are a few people who do sales pitches to people who don't have a projector to use, or who carry one around just so it is one less thing to rely on, but what about the majority of us who care about price, bulb price/hour, brightness, and resolution?
It seems the manufacturers haven't got it into their head that lower costs means they are selling to a different market.
A related complaint, I wanted an alarm clock radio that could play MP3s. Sounds easy? It isn't. I found a total of one product under $500 that can play MP3s and has an alarm. Why? Because they only make tiny little MP3 players that run off batteries, not ones the size of an alarm clock with a display I can read across the room.
You could build a full-resolution cinema-sized display, then all you'd need is a couple of matrox multi-head cards to drive them :)
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
The Mitsubishi site doesn't appear to have any real content on it about this product, but here's another review:
r ojector-8482.htm
http://www.techworthy.com/Blog/Mitsubishi-PocketP
Hmm. I have $699 to burn...
Do I buy a LED projector, or a SCO license?
I keep looking, but I cannot see how this is anything more than a product pitch. No comparisons, just 'this thing is really cool and think of all the cool things you can do with it'. TFA is nothing more than a rewarmed press release of the projector.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Offical Press Release, without pictures
2nd article with 1 picture
_JS
uhm, i dunno maybe i'm missing something, but how exactly is that useful in a car?
but what if you mounted one on your dashboard, and followed a semi with a nice white door..
with a little fm transmitter, you could even share the monotony breaker with neighboring cars..
watch a DVD on a cross country trip?
whoa fred- screens getting big! better brake!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
please guys - since almost everybody here is tech-savvy anyway: why don't you just fucking coralize links so everybody can read em and the servers aren't down after half a minute?
I'm curious what other number 1 "must have" gadgets are on your list.
And what does Lumens (N/A) mean? it doesn't use light?
That would explain the really long (20000 hour!) bulb life.
Me too, neither =(
Why is Lumens (N/A) a con? And what does Lumens (N/A) mean? it doesn't use light?
The author probably slashdotted the site while writing and couldn't fill that part in.
Don't expect it to be bright enough to use as a Bat-Signal. OTOH, it's probably just the thing for those home slide-shows, which people wouldn't do at the cost of other projectors. Some may winge about the resolution, but I think 800x600 is good enough for most things as when I'm demoing apps, I target an 800x600 desktop, because most people around here are still using that even if higher resolution is available.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
otherwise it would be a perfect fit for the Mac Mini.
800x600 has a 1000 pixel diagonal (8x6x10 right triangle. High school math came in handy for once), so a 40 inch projection will have 25 pixels per inch. Each pixel will be 1/25th of an inch, or (about) 3 of them will fit in an 8th of an inch.
Not bad for most uses of a wall projector.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Lumens are a way to measure the light which is isotropically radiated from a given source
...LEDs, as highly directional light sources, are measured in Candles (abbreviated "cd" or millicandles as "mcd") and not measured in Lumens.
Not to nit-pick (that's a pun...get it?) but what you are thinking of is referred to as "mean spherical candela". Lumens are simply the photometric equivilent of Watts (that is to say they are watts normalised to take into account the photopic curve which describes the spectral responsivity of the human eye) and are thus an excellent means of describing the optical output of a source or system.
Again I must disagree. As an illumination engineer I rely heavily on the Lumen ratings for the LEDs with which I design since that value is the integrated amount of light available from the source and is not related to the distribution of the emission. LEDs are indeed more directional than conventional sources but there is a wide range of emission patterns available.
Getting back to the matter at hand, I can't read the article but I agree that this device probably uses Luxeon emitters since they are the most concentrated sources available right now. The technology Lumileds is developing is advancing in leaps and bounds so it is unquestionably the case that these projectors are going to get a lot brighter quite soon. I wouldn't rush out and get this one since you will be able to get one about 50% brighter within a year for no more money (or at least no more cost to the manufacturuer, not always the same thing).
-Pinkoir
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000667030930/ Might as well slashdot them all!!
Video projectors haven't been following Moore's Law lately. A 2000 lumens 1024x768 for under $1000 has been years in coming, since that profile dropped below $3000 a few years ago. It appears that it's because the projector vendors target salespeople, and are feeding them with ever more portable projectors, more costly to produce than big, stationary ones. Maybe the higher turnover of travelling salespeople means they sell more units in that sector, always needing the "brand new" one, at the highest price, than across the board. I'd have thought the mass-marketing of home theater would have offered larger profits on more sales, without competing on miniaturization R&D.
Where is the 20lb ceiling-mount livingroom projector for $1000, that does 1024x768 @2000lm? Maybe this Mitsubishi projector will help compete them into existence.
--
make install -not war
It's an LED projector. It doesn't use a incadescent lamp with a white hot burning filament. It's posted on slashdot for reason. It's damn cool!
Luxeons aren't the most concentrated source out there. They're probably the most publicized high-power emitter out there, but Check out Lamina Ceramics if you want some real concentrated sources. Their highest-end commercial line, the BL-3000 line, has some pretty impressive specs for something less than 1.25 x 1.25 inches, including a 26-watt 567 lumen 5500K white light engine (which will set you back about $80 from Mouser Electronics. Search for Mouser part# 599-BL-32D0-0133).
I was following Lumileds pretty close until I read about the LTCC-M technology that Lamina is using. They're able to pack so many LED chips with this technology that it blows my mind, and they keep getting better at doing it, having just recently cut prices across the board for its two major product lines (BL-2000 and BL-3000).
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
US$699, why?
I build a projector by taking a slide projector and one of those miniture lcd screens.
I broke the screen open, removed the backlight and mounted in the projector. Hey presto a new projector. Everything ran on 12v, so I could in principle attach it to batteries or car adapter.
Total cost
4x3 cm LCD screen $60
Second hand projector $10
Total $70
Ok, so the image isn't the best quality and I had to get an extra cooling fan for the screen, which cost me about $10. My next project is with a laptop screen and an overhead projector with a one of those builders halogen lights. Then I can watch my favorite tv program against the side of a building.
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
The skewing you mantion is referred to as "keystoning" (because it turns your nice rectangle into a keystone-shaped trapezoid).
Most projectors (decent ones at least) will have a 'keystone adjustment' in their menu that you can use to correct this to a reasonable extent (they are limited as to how much of an angle they can correct for).
Check the specifications on a specific projector to make sure it includes keystone correction if you plan to use it at a non-trivial angle.
For $699, you get a LED (dim) LCD (crappy image) projector.
RTFA:
"It is lighted by three Lumileds(TM) LEDs (red, green, blue) that produce an SVGA (800 x 600 pixels) image formed digitally by the latest DLP(TM) chip by Texas Instruments."
This project sounds like it will need a screen like Sony's upcoming black screen that allows for viewing of projected images with lots of ambient light. Of course, the Sony screen might be a bit bigger than what this little projector can handle.
So for 20,000 hours of viewing it's:
$ 699 for the new LED unit.
$2100 for the InFocus X1a.
While 800x600 might seem all that great to most of the geek crowd, its more than enough to show a powerpoint presentation in a confrence room or hotel meeting room wall.
The trade off of size versus performance here would be a no brainer if you travel.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
At which point I will install it into my car with a tracking pan/tilt mechanism so I can project the words "dumbarse" and "half-wit", amongst others, onto the tyre (tire) covers of passing 4X4s (SUVs). This is what I've waited for for so long. Keep your flying cars, give me REVENGE ;-)
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
Are you/they sure it's 20,000 hours of lamp life? If that were true, that would be about 10 times more than for a typical projector. Just recently I purchased a Panasonic projector. During my research and shopping around I observed that all bulbs have between 2,000 and 3,000 hours of life in them.
So.... I question that 20,000 hours of life time quote...
You shouldn't... this projector uses LEDs, not lamps. The projectors you were looking at all used incandescent or flourescent technologies; a bright/hot/charged region getting electricity slammed through it to force it to give off photons.
This uses solid state LEDs; silicon junctions whose atomic makeup cause them to give off a specific frequency. Suitably heatsinked (and these come from the factory suitably heatsinked) you can give off TONS of light for a very long time.
This is good. This is exciting. These LEDs probably cost LESS than a bulb for a traditional projector, and last for a much longer period of time.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
It does not use a filimant bulb, it uses an LED as the light source. An LED has a typical life of 75,000 - 200,000 hours.
A little bird told me about TI's version of the same thing, it hadn't made it to market yet because they wanted a higher lumen output on the projector.
-Anonymouse
It is my understanding that LEDs still aren't quite bright enough for use in a projector. I've been toying with the idea of building my own LCD projector, and all the information I've seen on the net has said that LEDs just won't cut it. To get enough light, you need a cluster too big to approximate a point source. Using an array of them as a backlight has other issues for projection, but would work great in place of a CCFL in a standard LCD monitor (even if getting it to work is a bit labor intensive).
Here's one guy's attempt. There are tons of others, if you look around. No successes that I've come across though.
I haven't really kept up with LED technology, so maybe things have changed, but I kind of doubt it's any significant change. I have thought about taking a bunch of LEDs, putting them inside a reflective light box, and taking the light out through a multimode fiber optic cable, to scramble the light. The output of the cable would then act as a point source (with the appropriate lens in place).
Based on this little projector, and the rumors of LCD TVs powered by LED illumination, I'd guess that there are some LEDs out there to get the job done. These may still only be available to OEMs in large quantities though (assuming the OEMs don't have exclusivity on them).
I also have a suspicion that this system is not based on white LEDs (which are really modified blue LEDs, which is surprising, when you consider how good the color temperature ends up being). Instead, it's probably RGBs with dichroics mixing the colors. This would avoid the colorwheel needed in a DLP system, which would take up quite a bit of space and power.
Anyway, enough of this rambling. If this thing hits the market, and the picture quality is good (I'm mostly worried it won't be bright enough), then I'll get one. The speculative price is lower than a typical LCD or DLP projector, and there's no $600/yr operating fee (new bulbs). I wouldn't even worry about the cost of replacing the LEDs, since that's 10-20 years down the road (assuming pretty heavy usage).
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
Took me forEVER to figure out I was being slashattacked, and I've temporarily added in a static-page-caching mechanism for WordPress. I lose some of my dynamic code, but the site keeps running. ;)
--- David Chait, Editor [CHAITGEAR]
This Insight Media review from CES indicates only 10 lumens for this device - good for a 10-15" effective display. Hopefully this technology will improve further.