Recently, I tried out a pico projector (aka pocket projector), which I used to give a talk to about 25 people in a restaurant setting, with ordinary, not-too-dark not-too-bright restaurant lighting -- i.e., we did not dim the lights for the presentation. I knew the resolution limitations of the projector, so made the text large, etc to keep everything readable. I used a 20" x 30" sheet of white foam core as a screen, and aimed this tiny projector at it, and amazingly, it worked fine -- 12 lumens is enough to provide a surprisingly good image under subdued lighting. In a pretty dark room, these pico projectors can project a 60" diagonal image.
The projector I tried out for the presentation had no memory (whereas the AAXA does), so any video to be displayed had to come in through a composite video port. For my presentation, this meant carrying a laptop, plus a scan converter (from VGA to composite), and the projector -- still a light load, but a pocket projector would be much cooler with some memory, so that it can play a presentation (or a video, or slides, etc.) directly from the projector, without the need for any other hardware.
That experience lead me to buy a similar projector from AAXA, who gave me a discount, because I told them I would report on my experience for you people. The AAXA has 1 GB internal memory as supports micro sd cards for additional memory. It has built-in players for mpg (and other) videos, jpeg, bmp, mp3, etc. and has a built-in speaker -- so you can play most common media types directly from memory, while running on the internal battery.
If you haven't seen these things, they are surprisingly small -- about the size of a large cell phone:
The AAXA uses LCoS technology (rather than, for example, DLP) which is, in itself, is pretty interesting. The light is an LED and as a result never needs to be replaced (30,000 hour life). This is quite a departure from the average projector bulb which last about 2000 hours and costs hundreds of dollars to replace. Of course the average projector bulb is many times brighter.
Overall, a pretty cool little device that could be used to give an on-the-spot presentation to a potential client, potential investor, etc. (You could be on a plane and project a 12-15" image on the back of the seat in front of you.) The picture quality and brightness is not sufficient to gave a polished presentation for a large gathering, but there are all sorts of other uses that could make this a valuable thing to have. (Real estate agents could load images of all their properties, and could run through those anywhere there is a wall.) Obviously, my kids would live to have one, because it would allow them to share their cell phone pics and videos at large size, on any wall.
Using the device is simple and very straightforward. It is treated as another drive on your computer when you connect through USB. Just copy the files you want to show or hear. It does not have a built-in PPT player, so PowerPoint slides first have to be saved as jpg.
The price, $239, is very attractive.
As you'd guess, there are three real issues: brightness, optics, and resolution. Below, I'll address each. Also if you been considering using one of these, and have other questions, please ask.
AAXA Pico Projector 
Re: My AAXA pico projector
