Optoma Technology PK301 Pocket Projector

Optoma not only makes great projectors, they love to see how small and powerful they can make them. Consider the Optoma PK301 Pocket Projector. It's alittle bigger than its older brother, the PK102, but oh boy, what they've done with a few more inches and ounces.

When it's plugged into the wall you can get 50 lumens of projection power at a 2000:1 contrast ratio. On battery power the PK301 still puts out arespectable 20 lumens. And to think our customers gave the PK301's predecessor, the PK102, rave reviews at just 10 lumens.

Also, you should know that human brightness perception is logarithmic. That means to perceive a doubling in light output you'd have to increase brightnessby a factor of ten. Or to put it another way, you'll perceive the PK301 as half as bright as a 500 lumen projector.

The imaging panel is a Digital Light Processor from Texas Instruments and the lighting is an LED panel that's rated to last 20,000 hours. If you used thisprojector eight hours every weekday, 50 weeks a year (not recommended for the projectoror you for that matter) you're talking about 10 years of life.

Resolution is improved too. Your PK301 can do WVGA (854 x 480) natively and it can handle signals of up to WXGA (1280 x 800) resolution.

It's always good to have a nice clean screen to project on but your PK301 can handle pretty much any surface in a pinch. And it can project an image from 5to 120 inches across diagonally. Remember, though that the smaller the image you project the brighter it will be. It's best to stick to about half or lessof the theoretical maximum size. But you could still throw a white tarp over your car's windshield and tell the kids it's drive-in movie night without everstarting the car. (And you won't need those smelly anti-mosquito coils.) Be sure to remove the tarp before you go anywhere.

Speaking of going anywhere, this is one projector that can. It's compatible with both the NTSC and PAL video standards and it weighs only a half a pound including the standard battery. It's a little lighter without the battery and a little bit heavier with the optional higher capacity battery.

But wait! There's more! Order in the next 15 minutes and we'll include 720p and 1080i high definition capability! (Oh heck, we'll include it even if youorder tomorrow or next week or next month. Optoma built in the feature, after all.) But it is amazing isn't it? This mighty mite can actually project highdefinition video.

How do you get the HD into the tiny titan? With its Mini HDMI port of course. It's also got a VGA port for PC-based presentations and a USB port.

We've had a lot of fun with the PK301 but don't let our joking mood throw you off. This really is a serious business tool too. It's got 28 MB of internalmemory and it can accept MicroSD cards up to 16 GB. The free Optoma Video Encoder software (PC compatible only) can take your PowerPoint files, BMPs,JPEGs, AVIs, MOVs, MP4s and 3GPs and turn them into a format your PK301 can project. Your PK301 is ideal for mobile business presentations.

It's a good thing the Optoma PK301 Pico projector is so small and light. With all the fun you can have with it and its solid business credentials you mightend up bringing it to the office every day and taking it home every night.