The <$1000 Projection Project - Part 3 - The Projector

The focal point of any film projection set-up is, of course, the projector.  Projectors are another one of those items that have progressed incredibly just in the past decade or so.  I remember when my church got their first "portable" projector and we were in awe of such technology.  It was the size of a large suitcase and weighed as much as a small horse.  Mothers had to scold their children to stay away from its rolling cart for fear they would be run over by the monstrosity.  The room had to be perfectly dark and then you could see the picture all right as long as the projector was nearly touching the wall.  You could also tell when anyone in the church was using the projector because you could see the lights dim throughout the church as the massive bulb glowed to life.  We won't even talk about how many thousands of dollars it set the church back.

Today's projectors are in a whole different league.  You can now pick up a retina burning pocket sized projector for only a few hundred dollars.  So then one would think that we should have a lot of options to pick from...but there are really only a few that will serve our purpose.  First of all, we need our projector to be very energy efficient and low maintenance.  I will talk more about power sources in a future post, but the last thing we want to be doing is hauling around a generator sloshing gas all over the back of the car as we trundle out into the bush.  We need our system to run on battery.  The only way to do this efficiently is to use a projector that can be run from a 12V dc power supply without having to use a energy sapping inverter.  This will lead us down the only real viable path for our system...we need an LED projector.  There are both advantages and disadvantages to LED projectors.  On the good side, they use very little power, most on 12-15 Volts DC.  They can also be extremely compact...literally pocket sized.  They also use LED bulbs which mean that the bulb will realistically never really need replacing.  They are also fortunately inexpensive.  On the downside, there are not too many to choose from.  They also have a surprisingly small lumin(measurement of light) output.  While most conventional projectors boast a brightness of 1200-2500 lumins, the compact LED projectors usually produce 100 lumins or less.  Most people would assume that they can't be bright enough, and while that would be true in a well lit room,  for our purpose 100 lumins is more than sufficient.  My first LED projector boasted a mere 33 lumins and I found that, when it is dark, I could easily project an image up to 100 in diagonal that was surprisingly clear, even from distance.

So what are we looking for exactly in a projector?  Here is the list that I came up with:

-LED technology
-Supports DC input(12-15 Volts)
-Minimum of 50 lumins
-Either VGA, RCA or HDMI video input
-Built in video/audio player(as referenced in this post)
-SD or micro SD card slot(for video storage)
-Audio output(1/8th inch jack)
-Less than $400

After doing a bit of searching it seems like there are just a few projectors that meet our requirements.  This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are the ones from manufacturers I would trust.

-AAXA P3 Pico - 50 lumins, 12V, 1024x600 resolution, $269 from AAXA
-AAXA P4-X Pico - 100 lumins, 12V, 1280x768 resolution, $299 from AAXA
-Optoma PK320 - 100 lumins, 12V, 1280x800 resolution, $352 from Amazon
-Optoma PK301+ - 75 lumins, 12V, 854x480 resolution, $325 from Amazon

The AAXA P300 may also be worth a look at, but it comes in just above the price limit I set for the project at $420.

My trusty AAXA M1

Connectors on the AAXA M1

I have used both AAXA and Optoma projectors and they both seemed to work well.  I found the Optoma project to have better color and whiter whites, but also found it to be a little bit quirky.  I had some issues with it's internal battery, but that was resolved by using an external power source.  I also found their built in media playback interface to be a bit difficult to navigate.  For the past couple years I have been using an AAXA M1 Micro ultimate-X and it has been rock solid.  It doesn't have perfect color, but you don't really notice it unless you are trying to project something perfectly white.  I find the built in media player to be simple yet powerful.  One thing that I don't like about it is that there are not physical buttons on the unit itself, but a sort of touchpad that is difficult to you unless you have really tiny fingers...which I don't.  That can easily be resolved by using the included remote.  While the M1 Micro is still sold on the AAXA website, their tech support told me that it is now out of production.  I'm sure that any of the projectors listed above would work well for our purpose.  Based solely on specs and previous experience with the make, since I have not had the chance to personally try any of these projectors, my choice would be the AAXA P4-X Pico.  I don't see a reason to pay $50 more for the optoma projector when they have nearly identical specs.  I also lean toward AAXA because their tech support has been great.  It is not often that you can send a company an email asking for some technical information and receive a response within hours.

So my choice for projector is the AAXA P4-X which will set us back a mere $299, which gives us $701 yet to play with.

...next post amplifiers