Pico Projectors - More Features Found on Some Projectors, Plus, A Typical Pico Projector Tour-5

Posted on October 1, 2010 by Art Feierman

Physical Tour of a Pico Projector

OK, let's look at one of the most feature laden pico projectors. It happens to be my personal favorite of the lot (and my favorite of all picos I have seen to date). That projector, probably no surprise to you, is the Optoma PK301.

For those of you who have not yet looked at the reviews, I've borrowed much of this tour, from Tony's review of the PK301 (including his images)

In our "beauty" photo image to the right, almost the first thing you must notice, is that the PK301 pico projector is the only one that looks physically, like a typical portable projector, and without adding some scale, that makes it tough to decide its size, from the image. As it turns out, the PK301 projector is 4.7 wide, x 2.7 deep, and only 1.2 inches tall. That, folks isn't much bigger that a deck of cards.

The lens is recessed (a very good thing in a portable), and mounted close to the right edge (looking from the front). A focus ring is found around the lens.

It is manual focus, of course.

On the top, is the control panel of the 301 is shown here

Some pico projectors have inputs on the side, others on the back. The same is true for the input jack for power.

the AAXA L1 projector. In the dark of this side, you can make out the USB and card slot doors

The image shows one side of the V10 Plus, you can see the partially exposed SD card slot, as well as the holes for one of the two speaker.

Between the two, is the mini-jack for inputting a composite video signal, or outputting audio to headphones or a powered speaker system.

This one also from the 3M MPro150 (picture next to the page contents is the 3M MPro 150). In this case you are looking at the back of the MPro150 pico projector.

The 3M offers a multi-port labeled VGA-AV, as well as USB, audio in and power.

That's true, as long as the laptop can, in this case, limit its resolution output to no more than XGA (1024x768) which is about two steps up from the standard 640x480 resolution of this projector.