Just a first shout out from microprojector5.co.uk, while we get the blog set up and make it good enough that we are happy with it we thought we would start by announcing ourselves to the world! A few years ago projectors were an expensive option for image recreation anywhere outside of cinema’s and high end corporate offices. Since then the modern video projector has come on leaps and bounds. As people started to move cinema style projector film viewing and game playing into the home more and more technology companies jumped on the projector development bandwagon. This has meant increasingly better projectors for the average user to be able to afford.

Two years ago I wanted a high resolution camera to play films on and use with my computer, the best under £1000 in the uk was not particularly high resolution and reasonably limited by bulb life. Because of that I built my own projector with the help of the guys at lumenlabs (a great forum if you ever want to build your own projector.) This should show you how much I am into projectors. The build cost me a few hundred pounds, a fraction of the cost of a consumable projector with a lesser resolution and brightness, however it did have a bit of a size issue being just about a meter long and 30 cm square.

Shortly thereafter I brought a BenQ mobile projector at around £660. It was fairly good resolution and has served me well for the last few years. I had always reveled in the idea of things developing with the projector industry enough to make things even smaller, and after reading a patent that got flagged up from HP I saw that some of the big design companies had plans to move to handheld and smaller based projectors too. This was a wonderful progression and kept me paying attention to the projector market avidly.

Only recently has another great step happened in this market. Enter the handheld projector, (one shown is a 3M Pro 110 pocket projector) – this wonderful example of a personal projector (microprojector) is the start of the new league of super small projectors that open a whole new realm of life up to the computer. They mean you can project onto the bus seat while your sitting there, your wall anytime – who needs a screen when you can fit a projector in your pocket!

Obviously being the first real handheld projector to hit the scene its features leave a bit to be desired of but they are pretty good for the price and size!! the resolution of 640×480 is my main conern – great for video or projecting games or similar but not much good for computer output – watching a presentation on this pocket projector might be ok but not reading from a spreadsheet.

Either way this scene is set to hot up as these great little projectors that fit in your hand get better, so I decided to document my interest and run MicroProjector5.co.uk!