Bright Lights, Small Projector

You've hit the road with a great idea and a snazzy presentation to communicate it--the last thing you want to worry about is whether the conference room will have a working projector with which to display your dazzling opus. You could eliminate the worry by bringing a projector with you.

Until recently, that usually meant lugging along an extra box weighing 10 pounds or more. But a new generation of projectors manages to combine minimal weight with excellent image quality. The latest case in point: Compaq's first ultraportable data projector, the MP1600.

Weighing in at a mere 4.2 pounds, with a footprint smaller than most notebooks, the MP1600 is a great choice for mobile presenters. The projector's vertical design requires less space on the conference room table and also elevates the lens, making it easier to project images above other objects on the tabletop. An adjustable foot at the bottom of the MP1600 provides additional elevation, and allows the projector to be rotated 90 degrees.

Selling for an estimated $4500 on the street, the MP1600 is aggressively priced against competing products: InFocus's LP330 Dragonfly, for example, has comparable features and an approximate street price of $5800. But the MP1600 isn't perfect--it lacks a few conveniences normally found on more expensive, full-featured projectors.

Visual Performer

The MP1600 packs plenty of projecting punch for its tiny size. Even in a well-lit room, the projector's 600 ANSI lumens lamp and single-panel Texas Instruments Digital Light Processing display provided a bright, crystal-clear picture. (It didn't hurt that we were using a Stewart Filmscreen Videomatte screen, which is optimized for use with LCD and DLP projectors.)

The MP1600 is optimized for a native XGA resolution of 1024 by 768, but to help boost image quality, Compaq incorporates resolution scaling technology from PixelWorks, meaning you get distortion-free images at any resolution between VGA (640 by 480) and SXGA (1280 by 1024). Although many projectors on the market incorporate similar technology, Compaq's implementation does one of the best jobs we've seen, displaying an SXGA image at XGA resolution with minimal quality degradation.

The MP1600 also produced stunning motion video in both composite and S-video modes. When projecting feeds from an RCA DRD515RB DirecTV receiver, a Pioneer DVL-909 DVD/LaserDisc player, and a Philips TiVo Personal TV Recorder, the picture was bright and sharp, with good contrast and excellent color reproduction. There was no noticeable banding or distortion, though the blacks took on a slightly bluish tinge.

An added bonus on the video side: The MP1600 includes support for digital video graphics adapters designed for flat-panel displays (none of Compaq's notebooks currently offer digital flat-panel outputs, but some of the company's desktop systems do).