Aiptek's pico projector pocket cinema fails to impress

David M Williams
Sunday, 23 November 2008 04:42

Reviews - Peripherals

If only this worked it could have been the year's must-have Christmas gift for the gadget lover or the hard-to-buy-for. I'm talking about a pocket projector which on paper sounds brilliant: a tiny, battery operated, portable 10 lumens 640x480 video projector. Use it on the plane, the car, your roof, anywhere, without a care for power or weight. If only it worked.

Earlier this month I read David Pogue's review of the Optima Pico Pocket Projector – 4.1 by 2 by 0.7 inches, 0.7 ounces and thought it sounded wonderful. Here is a device you can effortlessly carry around and, without need for a power point, project a movie onto the wall or – so I assumed – give an impromptu business demonstration.

I imagined how terrific this projector could be for a mobile sales force. Imagine going to a client site and during the course of discussion whipping out your pocket projector and laptop and giving a quick demo off the cuff.

I was pretty excited then when browsing my local Dick Smith Electronics store and found the Aiptek PJV11X PocketCinema V10 Portable Projector - 12.4cm by 5.4cm by 2.0cm and integrated 1W speaker. We're talking tiny, although slightly bigger than the Optima that Pogue reviewed which, in metric, is 10.41cm by 5.08cm by 1.78cm. For our imperial friends, the Aiptek is 4.9" by 2.1" by 0.9".

The description reads, “A truly amazing pocket sized projector, no bigger than a mobile phone but it projects an image up to 50” and can be used for business meetings and watching movies or playing games.” I quickly snapped it up for $AUD 649 (although I later discovered Harris Technology sell it for $AUD 499.) It is $USD 299 from Aiptek directly.

Upon taking it home and opening the box the first thing I noticed was there is no VGA input. There is a composite A/V in socket but that's all. Thus, despite the box even carrying a picture of a guy with a pie chart on his laptop flashing it up onto a wall for others to see you can immediately forget any notion of using this as a data projector for your laptop unless your laptop has a TV out or S-video port and have the appropriate adapter to convert that signal into composite A/V.

I have to say, that's pretty disappointing from the onset. Sure, the device is small. Maybe a VGA input would have added weight and size. I don't know about that, but I certainly know for my money the usefulness of the projector diminished significantly with this omission.

It was moot anyway: after charging the battery overnight I discovered it wouldn't even power on using just the battery. I could turn it on if I left it plugged in to power. Yet, even then it played its nice start-up melody, displayed the menu screen, flickered, flashed up “!!! OVERHEAT !!!” and turned off.

After repeating this process several times with no improvement – even checking the battery was inserted properly and turning on a fan – I figured the unit had to be faulty.

I returned to Dick Smith and the helpful sales attendant confirmed the problem, retrieved another unit, plugged in my charged battery and lo-and-behold it worked right away. Admittedly a sample size of two is not much but 50% of units I tried were flawed. Not a good start.

So off I left with my replacement unit. On the one hand, it was great – I could flick through the sample photos included while laying back on bed, using my roof as a cinema – but on the other hand I couldn't do anything more.

Let me tell you about the bundled software which alleges to convert media files into the projector's desired format. In short, it's a turkey.

CONTINUED