"Ultra-portable" projectors provide weighty alternative

Office World News, Jun 2000 by Sauer, Jeff

For road-savvy presenters, "ultraportable" traprel projectors are fast becoming standard tools of the trade. Within the pest year or two, they've become lights enough to carry in a shoulder bags and bright enough to impress. In act, today's sleek little machines often provide more brightness and better image quality than the aging conference-room projectors you might find orb site.

Today's travel projectors weigh as little as 5 pounds, making them nearly as easyto pack along as notebook computers. Some manufacturers have even added a computer pocket to their projector carrying cases, making the whole bundle a single piece of carry-on luggage.

With prices that range from $2,000 to $8,000, travel projectors (defined here as projectors weighing up to 8 pounds) don't come cheap. But having a capable projector "in pocket" means you can expect fewer surprises, and for those who make a living as over-the-road message-bear rs, the cost of a travel projector is often less than the cost of not being in control.

Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology from; Texas Instruments has been one of the main catalysts behind the recent flood of tiny projectors, and many of! the most compact units have DLP clips at their core. But makers of ICD projectors haven't thrown in ithe towel, and many observers maintain that single-chip DLP technology can't match the color reproduction and image quality of three-panel LCD projectors, some of which have Also broken the 8-pound weight barrier. This healthy air of competition; is driving Texas Instruments to improve DLP's image quality even as it encourages LCD makers to posh for ever-smaller form factors. THE WEIGHT CATEGORIZATION GAME Just a few years ago, the first sub20-pound "portable" projectors burst onto the scene. A short while later, projectors broke the 10-pound barrier, and a new projector classificationthe "ultraportable" was born. Although today's so-celled "portables" in the 10to 20-pound range typically sport carrying handles, their main mode of transport is more likely to be the room-to-roam AV cart than the overhead luggage bin. These projectors typically have the multiple input/output options and higher brightness ratings common to conference-room and fixed-installation projectors. Meanwhile, the ongoing miniaturization of key projector components has even made the 10pound "ultraportable" dividing line prise. With the lightest projectors now weighing 5 pounds or less, marketers and industry watchers have been struggling to differentiate these flyweights from those weighing nearly twice as much. The terms "microportable," "superportable," and "ultraultraportable" have been bandied about to emphasize these projectors' physical lightness, but none has become universal. To stay current, the International Communications Industries Association (ICIA) has announced that at this June's Infocomm Projector Shoot-Out-the largest side-by-side comparison of multimedia projectors in the worldit will redraw the line that separates "ultraportables" from "portables." Moving away from the previous demarcation line of 10 pounds, ICIA will now categorize projectors weighing less than 8 pounds as "ultraportable" and anything between 8 and 30 pounds as "portable." The ICIA has decided to make no further distinctions (such as "microportable") for lighter-weight projectors, AV Avenue, an online magazine and all-around audiovisual resource, has also adopted the 8-pound dividing line to designate ultraportables (which we call "travel" projectors), although it uses more categories than ICIA for projectors at the higher end of the weight spectrum. While the ICIA redefinition has been described as the result of an industry-wide vote of member companies, not everyone wholeheartedly agrees with the new categories, especially for the purpose of marketing projectors or analyzing the industry. LCD-oriented manufacturers question the new definition of "ultraportable," since only a few (including Sharp, Epson, Mitsubishi, and Sony) have been able to breach the 8-pound line with LCD-based units. And although vendors of sub-8-pound DLP projectors may believe the new delineation better reflects the current market, most aren't likely to drop the term "microportable" any time soon. Understandably, LCD projector makers insist that a projector's mass shouldn't be the only criteria buyers look at. "Prospective buyers need to take other factors like image quality into account, rather than just the weight of a projector," suggests Sony's Jonathan Holmes. While Sony's VPLCS1 falls into the new "ultraportable" travel-projector category, the company's VPL-XC50U does not, even though it was clearly designed with the traveling presenter in mind. The projector has a unique vertical form factor that makes it easy to carry and pack-but alas, it weighs 8.2 pounds. Epson's Mark Pickard similarly proposes that buyers shouldn't rule out one projector just because it weighs a pound more than another. "They should compare all the features," he says. "LCD technology has a lot to offer in terms of image quality." Epson-which doesn't make any DLP projectors-offers a trio of three-panel LCD projectors at well under 8 pounds, but the company also offers some very portable designs-like the PowerLite 5550c-that weigh between 8 and 10 pounds. Ultimately, both Sony and Epson-which also manufacture and sell LCD panels to other projector manufacturers-are realistic about where their technology is headed. Both agree that, for manufacturers of LCD projectors, the 8pound distinction is somewhat awkward, given the products currently available. However, they also claim that the distinction will no longer be an issue within a few months as new LCD-based technologies and refinements emerge. Some industry analysts, like Bill Coggshall of Pacific Media Associates, don't believe the new categories better represent the state of the industry. In fact, Coggshall's group is taking the contrary step of raising the weight limits in the size categories it uses to track projector sales volumes. In Pacific Media's sought-after research, "ultraportables" will weigh from 6.6 to 11 pounds, while projectors weighing 11 to 22 pounds will be labeled "portables." Units that weigh less than 6.6 pounds will be designated as "microportables" or "ultra-ultraportables." "We feel these distinctions better represent what's currently available," explains Coggshall.