People always recognize how long to wait for the sweet spot to appear in technology purchases. When a brilliant new concept appears on the horizon, most technology buyers will discuss incessantly what kind of new beginning the revolution brings, and what it means to life in general. You saw what happened with the MP3 player, the cell phone, the EeePC, all the things we take for granted now. When one of them actually makes it to the market, of course everyone notices right away how the devil is in the details - the first VCRs took forever to load up and begin to play a movie, and the picture quality was tolerable at best. Everyone complained of thin and sterile music from the first CDs and MP3 players, and how the single-line LCD displays made them impossible to use. And the first EeePC with the 2GB SSD hard drives unleashed whole series of magazine articles on how to whittle Windows XP down to fit on them, or better still, give up Windows XP in favor of Ubuntu. In the world of the pocket presentation projectors, that's where we are right about now.
It all started last year - computer peripherals makers began to introduce little projectors the size of a cell phone. Their market were the hordes of PowerPoint presenting road warriors who need to share graphs and charts with colleagues and business partners regularly. Digging out the laptop each time and having a bunch of people crowd around was annoying. The image quality wasn't that great at all; you could get maybe a dull 3-foot image splashed across a wall, that quickly washed the moment anyone turned a light on. So it had its problems; but the idea was such a tempting one, that every major peripherals manufacturer began efforts to get in on the act. What a great idea to sell! School kids could regale their friends with a YouTube video on the wall; when they were home, they could get into bed, and with the lights turned off, have a nice movie played out on the ceiling. The possibilities were endless for these ultra-mini presentation projectors.
So now a year later, the industry is finally settling down on some kind of a sweet spot in prices and a minimum level of acceptable performance. They have a brand new name for this product too - the pico projector. And there are already two competing standards coming up. The first is the category where pico presentation projectors are built right into a cell phone (like the LG Expo). And the second is a separate unit, that puts out a brilliant image, with lasers - the Aaxa L1 being the only example so far. Actually, the LG Expo is the first phone of its kind over here. In Asia, they've apparently had it for ages. Which is a shame, because the LG Expo is about the worst possible implementation of this brilliant new technology. It is less than a hundredth as bright as a regular projector, and the phone is very difficult to use. But since it's the first of its kind, people are bound to buy it for the novelty of it.
The standalone Aaxa L1 is much better; about four times as bright as the LG, and it uses lasers, and can connect to most kinds of sources. But it only plays MPG, AVI, WB and ASF and if it is not the right format, you'll have little trouble on your hands. Pico presentation projectors may not have really hit that sweet spot just yet. But they're much better than the sweet spot we had last year, and that seems pretty exciting.