Mini projectors are best suited for roaming professionals as these are so thin, lightweight and compact that they can be easily accommodated in a notebook bag. You should not carry any extra peripheral for the projector. So it is very compact for use.

Even for the home segment or the so-called corporate commercial space where a project leader gets into a small meeting room to make a presentation to four-eight member team, one can have the luxury of a big-screen projection on the wall. As the audience size is small, brightness is small at 200 lumens. Conventional DLP projectors used in offices, on the other hand, have a brightness of 1500-2500 lumens. Projectors for some of the bigger board rooms would even go beyond 3500 lumens. However, it’s not a compromise because you will use the mini projector present to a smaller group.

Even for Homes, especially nuclear families, a mini projector is an ideal companion to the working couple as they can enjoy the movie downloaded into their laptop on a reasonably big screen.

Technologies available

Projector Technologies could be broadly categorised into Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) and Digital Light Processing (DLP). In terms of professional technology, until four to five years ago, LCD technology dominated the market. But LCD projectors were power guzzlers and therefore had to have a larger form factor to allow more room for cooling. And with time, their color fidelity decayed. That is, after two three years of use, red would not be pure red.

But DLP, which is the most predominantly growing technology today, is digital and therefore able to shrink so many things in a small form factor and consumes much less power. Also, there is no color decay with time.

LED technology is new, it is a filter-less design giving almost 10-15 times the average life of the product. LED based DLP projectors use LED’s as the light source to produce images. Traditional DLP and competing projector technologies use a lamp as the light source. An LED based projector consumes less power than a lamp-based model, and runs cooler. It is quieter too, as it doesn’t need fans inside to cool down the lamp. Also, LED based projectors are ergonomically much more user friendly.

Palm projectors are DLP based LED projectors. LED palm projectors have a lamp life about 30,000 hours and are slightly expensive than normal projectors.

Liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) is an emerging technology. It’s a hybrid between LCD and DLP technologies and has native resolution starting at SXGA. However, it is expensive at the moment.