The Cinemin Slice has a reasonably bright DLP projector built into it, and all you need to do is slide your iPod, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPhone, or iPad into the dock, and you can project your video onto any spare wall you’ve got around.

While the tiny projector only outputs 854×480 resolution at just 16 lumens, I was pleasantly surprised by how bright it was compared to most pico projectors I’ve seen. I had a chance to see it first-hand at CES, and even with all the ambient light in the room, they were able to get about a 3-foot diagonal picture on a beige wall that you could actually see. The shot below shows how bright it is when it’s isolated from ambient light.

In a darkened room, on a white wall or projection screen, you’ll do substantially better. WowWee says you should be able to get a bright 60-inch picture (from about 10 feet away) in a darkened room with no problem. The dock also has a built in audio system with two 6-watt speakers, and will also accept Mini-HDMI, VGA or composite video inputs.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The Cinemin Slice is will ship sometime this month is available for pre-order now, and retails for $429.99 (USD).

The guys over at Ostendo are making these new CRVD displays, which not only offer a whopping 2880 by 900 pixel resolution, but are curved to engulf you in the action with a 90-degree field of vision. And when combined with ATI’s Eyefinity multi-display tech, you can set up multiple displays side-by-side to create a truly immersive gaming experience.

Each CRVD has a 43″ diagonal screen with an insane 32:10 widescreen ratio, backed by a bright, yet compact DLP rear projection system.

Somehow I overlooked these bad boys back when I was trolling the aisles at the CES show back in January, but from the looks of these sample video clips, I’m not sure how I could have.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

…and that’s just a single monitor. How about three?

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

So here’s the bad news. At $6499 (USD), you’ll need to take out a second mortgage to buy just one of these, and you’d probably have to sell a kidney on the black market to fund a triple-display rig like the one shown in the video.

[via NewLaunches]

The Ideum MT-50 retails for about $21,000 (USD) and is designed for use in museums, tradeshows and other exhibitions (why not my living room?) and features a massive 50-inch multitouch glass surface. It can detect up to 40 simultaneous points of input, so multiple users can interact with it at the same time. The MT-50 is designed for durability too. It’s built from aircraft-grade aluminum and steel, and the tempered glass tabletop is designed to be nearly indestructible.

The Ideum table offers a 1280 x 720 display, and ships with Gestureworks, a library which allows true multitouch interaction using Adobe Flash. By comparison, Microsoft’s Surface only has, 1024 x 768 resolution display, and requires that your develop apps using Microsoft proprietary toolkits such as WPF, XNA and Expression Blend. The MT-50 also bests the Surface standard build with a beefy 3GHz quad core CPU, versus Microsoft’s 2.13 GHz dual core.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The MT-50 has already found its way into numerous museum exhibitions, such as this recent mashup between Google Maps and Flickr used in an exhibit at the California Science Center.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

And if the production 50-incher isn’t enough for you, the guys at Ideum have already built a custom 100-inch version of the table for one client:

Now all I need is one of these in my living room, and I’ll be all set.

The Joybee GP1 may have a silly name, but under the covers this tiny little projector means business. The compact projector measures in at just 5.35″ (w) x 2.24″ (H) x 4.72″ (D) and weighs only 1.4lbs. To put that in perspective, it’s about 2/3rds of the size of a Mac Mini.

And this isn’t one of those silly pocket projectors that can barely muster an image in a darkened room. The GP1 is powered by three bright PhlatLight LEDs and a Texas Instruments DLP panel (you know, the kind with millions of tiny mirrors). Contrast ratio is rated at 2000 to 1, but I don’t have the equipment on hand to prove how accurate that is or not. Regardless, when I checked out some test content, it looked as good or better than the contrast on my backlit LCD television, but not quite as good as my pricey SXRD display. Brightness is quoted at just 100 ANSI lumens, which certainly won’t win any contests, but is more than sufficient if you’re in a light-controlled environment.

Keep in mind that the on-screen photos below don’t really show you how good the picture looks – there’s nothing like taking photos in a dark room with no tripod.

The diminutive projector manages to crank out images from 15″ to 80″ diagonal, and while it works best in a darkened room – it can reasonably handle large images in a room with some ambient light. Here’s a 50″ image with the lights off and then on.

The Joybee’s native resolution is 858×600, which isn’t quite HD, but is plenty for playing video games, watching DVDs or doing business presentations. And speaking of video formats, the GP1 can handle most resolutions you can throw at it from 640×480 to 1280×1024 from your PC, and 480i/p, 576i/p, 720p and 1080i for other video sources. There’s a pretty good downscaling system for those higher resolutions, but you’ll always lose some information when you drop the resolution down lower than the source. At native resolution, the images are sharp as a tack.

In addition to being small, the GP1 offers the ability to be operated without a PC or other video source attached. That’s because it has a built-in multimedia playback system that can handle images and video files in a variety of formats through its USB reader. Out of the box, it can support XviD, MPEG-4 and MJPEG formats, as well as images in JPG, GIF, BMP and TIFF. BENQ also will be bundling a copy of ArcSoft MediaConverter to take your files and transcode them to the formats required by the projector. Keep in mind that the max video playback resolution off the USB reader is 720×480 at 30fps, which is slightly lower rez thatn the projector’s native pixels. Of course, you could always just hook up your laptop and play a DVD to skip all that rigamarole. Or better yet, just dock your iPod or iPhone, with the optional dock.

I did run into some decrease in brightness when playing content from the VGA port on my Dell laptop (images above), but given how bright the projector was with content on a USB flash drive, I think the issue was more likely something with the video output on my computer than the projector itself. That said, with VGA – YMMV.

The pint-sized projector also has a nifty feature that color corrects images based on wall color. I live in a house filled with colorful walls, so I decided to put this feature to the test. There are presets for a variety of wall colors, including blackboards.

Here’s a shot taken on a medium green wall in my media room with the correction set to “light green” (the whites sure looks white to me):

A few other niceties include auto keystone correction, a tripod socket for installing the projector when you don’t want to put it on a tabletop, and a built-in speaker (that won’t blow anyone’s eardrums). The projector also has advanced settings for flipping the image upside-down or backwards so you can ceiling mount or rear-project with it too.

But I think my favorite thing about the GP1 (besides its size, of course) is the fact that it starts up immediately with no wait time. Plus, the LED light source can run for 20,000 hours, which means you won’t ever be changing expensive light bulbs like you do with traditional projectors. It still generates a tiny bit of noise (28db) in order to keep those bright LEDs cool, but it’s way quieter than my Xbox 360 – or my PS3 for that matter.

Included in the box is a power pack that’s about the size of your average laptop charger, a compact remote control, and special CEA 30-pin video cable for connecting to VGA or composite video sources and analog stereo audio. There’s also little nylon carrying case that fits only the projector, but none of the accessories. There’s no component video cable included, but you can always pull component signals through the VGA connector with the proper adapter.

Unfortunately, there are no DVI or HDMI connectors. Hopefully BENQ will recognize this shortfall and come up with a 30-pin to HDMI cable in the future. I’m also not a big fan of the remote control – the keys aren’t in the most logical places, and I have a rule that any device that is operated with the lights off should have a backlit remote. On the plus side, it’s just an IR remote, so you can use any of the learning remotes out there if you’d prefer.

Overall, I’m impressed with this little projector. Subjectively speaking, Image quality is quite good for a device of its size, and I love the idea that you can use it without a PC if you want. Again, the biggest miss as far as I’m concerned is the lack of a digital input. HDMI is de riguer these days, and there’s no good excuse for not including an HDMI input on the GP1 – especially since it’s got built-in audio. Sure, the GP1 is never going to compete on brightness with larger units powered by traditional light sources, but for a impromptu gaming party or if you travel and do lots of business presentations, it’s great. I just love the idea that I can throw this little guy in my backpack, and set up a mini movie theater anywhere I go. It’s also a cool gadget for things like art video installations or in darkened environments like nightclubs, where you could load up a bunch of standalone units with video loaded onto a USB thumb drive and project some esoteric imagery.

The Joybee GP1 will be available from U.S. retailers (and direct from BENQ) on June 10, 2009, with an MSRP of $499 (USD). If you’re in the market for a compact projector, you’ll definitely want to check out the BENQ website for more details.

The InFocus Play Big IN1 gaming projector is powered by a TI DLP chipset, and easily connects to your gaming console or DVD player to crank out huge, reasonably bright images. So what’s the catch? In this era of high-definition video, the native resolution of the projector is only 640×480 (VGA). Sure, it’ll accept a 720p or 1080i/p signal, but it’s all down-rezzed to 480p. It’s got connectors for S-Video, component and composite video, but there’s no HDMI or DVI inputs at all.

While the projector isn’t ideal for HD sources like the Xbox 360 or PS3, it is a perfect match for the Nintendo Wii, which doesn’t output high-def. Heck, InFocus even includes a Wii component cable to make it super simple to get up and going with the popular Nintendo console. The funky-looking trapezoidal projector even has a built-in stereo sound system, so other than a projection surface, it’s entirely self-contained.

Even though the IN1 can project images up to 210-inches diagonal. However, at that size I’m betting the 500-lumen output won’t be sufficient for anything but a really dim picture in a really dark room. On the other hand, it should be plenty bright at anything under 100-inches. As is always the case with front projection, I’d recommend a light-controlled environment.

So if you’re looking for a huge picture on a not-so-huge budget, the Play Big IN1 is worth a look. It’s available for $499 exclusively from Woot.

[via CrunchGear]

TI plans on demonstrating the improved image quality at this week’s CEDIA home theater expo on a 3-chip 1080p projector capable of a 15,000 to 1 native contrast ratio. They also will be showing a demonstration of an LED-illuminated television that can crank out contrast as high as 100,000 to 1.

Expect DarkChip4 to start hitting projectors in 2008.

The new Mitsubishi WD-73734 features a huge 73-inch diagonal widescreen, but is only 17.5-inches deep. It’s got the latest in DLP technology with a 6-color light wheel, and support for x.v. Color, which extends the available color gamut by up to 80% over conventional sets. The set also has four HDMI 1.3 inputs, which can handle those wide color gamut devices like the Sony PlayStation 3 and newer high definition disc players. The set also has something Mitsubishi calls the DarkDetailer, which is just a fancy name for a dynamic iris system. This should help the set produce exceptional contrast levels.

The $3900 television outputs at full 1080p native resolution (and accepts 1080p source signals,) so you won’t miss any little detail from those high-def signals. Plus, Mitsubishi’s Plush1080p upscaling circuitry should make the most of less-than-perfect content as well. Of course there’s a built-in digital tuner, capable of receiving over-the-air HD broadcasts.

[Order this Item from Amazon]

Measuring just 3.7″ (h) x 9.2″ (d) x 10.8″ (w), the projector features full 1080p resolution. All those pixels come courtesy of a single Texas Instruments DLP chip. The projector is also one of the smallest that I’ve seen with TI’s BrilliantColor tech, which increases color gamut significantly over standard DLPs. Brightness is rated at a solid 1000 lumens, and the DLP’s 5x speed, 7-segment color wheel should reduce the likelihood of the dreaded “rainbow effect” common in many older DLP sets.

While it may be small, the projector comes with some serious home theater features, including compatibility with most digital home control systems using IP or RS232 control schemes. Each projector is also individually calibrated on the production line using projectiondesign’s RealColor suite, ensuring optimal image quality before the projector ever makes it to your home.

Pricing was not announced, but I’d expect to drop at least a couple of paychecks on this, given projectiondesign’s high-end track record.

[via ecoustics]

Optoma’s new HD80 projector will retail for just $2999 when it’s released this July, but will pack in video quality usually reserved for much more expensive projectors. Powered by TI’s DarkChip2 and Brilliant Color chip set, the front projector pumps out super sharp 1920 x 1080 resolution images.

In addition to the 1080p rez, the HD80 will feature 1300 lumens of brightness and claims a stellar 10,000:1 contrast ratio. Image processing is courtesy of a 10-bit motion adaptive de-interlacer and PixelWorks video processing circuitry.

The projector also includes a wide variety of inputs, including dual HDMI (v1.3), DVI w/HDCP, S-Video, Component, Composite, RS-232, 12V Trigger and a remote IR receiver port.

[via Gizmodo]

The wee projector modules use DLP’s “millions of tiny mirrors” technology, yet will be small enough to be integrated into cell phones and other mobile devices. New efficiencies in lighting technologies and miniaturization enable the creation of these tiny little projection devices. No release date has been announced for production of these devices, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some tangible implementations as soon as late 2008 / early 2009.

The Runco VX (Video Extreme) series of DLP front projectors come in a number of models designed to handle a variety of different installation needs, but all require a sizeable investment:

• VX-2000d: Single Chip DLP / 1280×1080 /220W UHP Lamp ($16,995)
• VX-6000d: Single Chip DLP / 1920×1080 / 220W UHP Lamp ($35,995)
• VX-22d: Three Chip DLP / 1920×1080 /300W Lamp ($44,995)
• VX-44d: Three Chip DLP / 1920×1080 /1000W Xenon Lamp ($79,995)
• VX-55d: Three Chip DLP / 1920×1080 /1200W Xenon Lamp ($114,995)

All of the VX projectors come with Runco’s DHD controller, which now offers HDMI input capability. The higher end models feature interchangeable lenses and all models can be upgraded with Runco’s CineWide technology allow for full 2:35 to 1 CinemaScope movies to be shown in their original format without black bars.

The THX Certified Display program evaluates the quality of display color, luminence, contrast, uniformity, resolution, video processing quality among other tests. Only displays which pass these rigorous tests are awarded the THX badge. Now if only I could afford one.

[via Home Toys vis Engadget HD]

The system features a 100-inch diagonal screen and a 2000 lumen DLP front projector, running at 1024×768 (XGA) resolution. An Athlon 64 CPU powers the arcade emulator PC. A full arcade control panel with authentic arcade joysticks, countless buttons, a spinner, lighted trackball and even a light gun. The system ships with tons of titles from Atari, Midway, Namco, Capcom and some classic Laserdisc games from Digital Leisure (Dragons Lair I, II and Space Ace). Additional games can also be installed on the system using the pre-installed MAME32 emulator.

As an added bonus, the system is a fully-functional home theater and music jukebox. The system is being offered at an introductory price of $4499 USD, which is $500 under the final price. While you could probably throw together your own MAME box with a projector and screen for a bit less, this system is pre-configured and ready to go, plus you get technical support from Dream Arcades.

[via Kotaku]

The Optoma HD70 projector features a single 0.62-inch DarkChip2 DLP chipset from Texas Instruments. producing a dynamic contrast ratio of up to 4000:1. The DLP array operates at true 720p resolution, making it capable of displaying much of the high definition content available today. The projector outputs light at a admirable 1000 lumens.

In addition to the native 720p mode, the onboard scaler can handle video in NTSC, PAL, SECAM formats in 480i/p, 576i and 1080i/p resolutions and either 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios.

The projector also has a nice array of inputs including: HDMI, Component Video, VGA with Component & SCART Compatibility, Composite Video (RCA), S-Video and a 12V Trigger Relay for home theater installations. At just 5.6 pounds, it’s also quite portable.

[via AboutProjectors]