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.

Sony is a pretty major brand to join the pico-projector embedding market if it isn’t going to be big. There have also been news of other camera producers including the Texas Instruments DLP pico-projector module in their gadgets (although I bet they arent as simply embedded as grabbing a beagleboard kit and texas instruments dlp unit) – but the question is which camera manufacturer will win the pico-projector-camera war that is brewing? It will be great for consumers too this one – camera’s and micro-projectors are a great tag team gadget combo, as we have repeated a few times on this blog.

The integration of a touchable pico projector module for them will be the real development, imagine the capacity to skip through your photographs on the projection coming through the camera, effectively allowing you complete gui control of your camera, from a 100 inch wall projection, now that’d be cool – give it 6 months and we might even see it! (the technology to do this is actually already available as per previous posts on MicroProjector5, but the combination is yet to be seen and the projection unit’s in the touch sensitive pico-projector’s aren’t as good as the regular ones.) Come on Sony, lets see what pico-projector your going to go with and how your going to bring it to the Sony-Loving masses!