A recent comment by a reader on a recent post on the Optoma PK301 at CES10 pointed out the image looked to show a HDMI slot on the side of the new pico projector, and after reading a few reviews online this morning it seems that Morphemass was 100% right! The new Optoma PK301 does indeed have a hdmi slot, its the first pico projector to our knowledge that allows you to put hdmi strait into it. Perhaps this development became worthwhile once they upped the resolution a bit (the pk301 has a nice 854 x 4780 res) – or perhaps Optoma realised the possibilities of the use of HDMI in their latest picoProjector.

We missed this one – but on the 25th of January Mitsubishi Electric (TYO:6503) announced their launch of their new red laser diode (ML520G72) – the worlds highest output ability red laser diode. With a 638 nanometer wavelength this new laser diode is extremely efficient and is ideal for use in pico projector’s and other laser based small display technologies. Effectively offering a red light source with extremely high brightness this red laser from Mitsubishi could bring a whole new level to pico projector’s running on lasers.

Rumbles last week from DigiTimes and then the associated gadget media suggested that Sony want to match the other digital camera manufacturers (nikon S1000Pj pico camera) and produce digital compact camera’s with pico projector built into them, allowing for a bigger GUI and more sharing capacity to each digital camera. Sony has done a deal with Opus Microsystems, licensing their laser based scanning mirror chips. It’s nice to see another big name joining the party, even more so with laser based pico projector technology.

Digitimes yesterday reported the fact that mobile phone handset vendors might be easing off the idea of including embedded pico projector’s into their handsets. This news comes from the realisation that people would not really use the picoprojector part of the phone as they expected, because largely people do not want to share publicly (one of the micro projector benefits) things they have stored on their mobile. I can see this point but I am still not sure of its validity because I think a lot of things put on phones can be shared, like mp3 tracks with visualisations and videos.

Big rumours swept a few sites over the last few days that before the summer is out HP are going to launch a pico projector enabled laptop, its only rumours as far as we can check so far but what a rumour! The idea has been floating around for a while, combining the tiny embedded pico-projector’s with the systems that power them, idea’s of a netbook with no screen just a small projector, fuller systems the size of a regular keyboard with the pc built into it, projecting across desks etc. But if the rumours are correct HP are stepping up the idea beyond the speculative talking, could we have a fully feldged pico projector laptop by the end of 2010?

So you have a new pico projector, its your pride and joy and you love taking it places and projecting onto random things from walls to cars – but what if you drop it? Some pico projector’s come with cases as standard but probably the majority do not come with their own carry case. Camera case designers and manufacturers are slowly starting to make or tailor pico projector carry cases specifically but not many are available in everyday shops.

Another pico that popped up its small little gadget head at CES 2010 was the new Samsung pico projector. The last samsung pico – the samsung mbp200 seems almost like a distant memory now, being one of the first pico projectors to hit the mainstream around the time of the original 3M microprojector the Mpro110. Since then 3M has launched two new pico projectors all the way to market, but is the new Samsung pico projector a killer gadget? or just another pico-projector late to the party?