Stuff a Big Screen in Your Pocket With This Tiny Projector

If you’re in the market for an impressive piece of visual equipment, look no further than Sony’s 2,000-lumen short-throw projector that offers tack-sharp 4K images in tight spaces. But here’s the bad news: It costs $50,000. If you’re looking for something more affordable ($350) and portable—a little projector for your business meetings, blanket forts, or dollhouse—there’s a smartphone-sized HD model coming out in October.
For a pico projector, the pocketable MPCL1 has some impressive traits. It’s a laser projector, which helps make it slimmer, quieter, and sharper than competing LED and DLP pico projectors. Still, it’s not quite full HD resolution—this little unit has an odd resolution of 1920×720—but that’s still pretty high-res for a pico projector. Even in our age of technological wizardry, most pocket projectors top out at WVGA (800×480) resolution.

But the coolest trait is that this pocketable laser projector focuses itself unlike traditional DLP, LED, and LCoS models. Sony says that even if you project an image on an uneven or curved surface, all parts of the picture will be in focus. That’s due to the nature of lasers and the PicoP laser-beam scanning system, developed by a company called MicroVision, being used in the MPCL1. The projector uses red, green, and blue lasers as light sources for the image, and those lasers hit a constantly moving MEMS mirror to reflect images toward your wall or another projection surface.
That means you only have to move this projector closer or farther from a wall to adjust the image size without having to tinker with focus controls. According to Sony, it’ll project a sharp 40-inch diagonal image from four feet away and will give you a 120-inch picture from 12 feet away.

Judging from the available specs, which aren’t plentiful, those 120-inch images will be dim. The projector has a brightness rating of just 32 lumens, which seems laughable compared to the 200- to 500-lumen portable DLP projectors already on the market. However, that’s where the lasers and the sharper resolution come into play: Lasers have a low luminous flux (measured in lumens), but they have very high luminous intensity (measured in candelas). Regardless, this is a projector you’ll need to use in really dark rooms.
It’s not the first pico projector of its kind on the market. In fact, the Celluon PicoPro, which received an Editor’s Choice award from PCMag.com and accolades from CultOfMac, has the same brightness rating and the same PicoP laser-scanning system. Sony’s image-slinger has similar overall specs, including mini-HDMI in, a battery life of around two hours, and the ability to stream video from a phone, tablet, or laptop over Wi-Fi. You can also use the projector’s 3,000mAh battery to charge your phone.
As small as it is, the upcoming laser projector—which will go on sale on Amazon in October—is still another thing you’ll have to carry around in addition to your phone. But it’s also a glimpse at the near-term future, when mobile devices are likely to have their own built-in projectors. Sony wouldn’t divulge just how big the current laser-projector module is, but shrinking it down small enough to fit into a phone seems like a logical next step. And like its image sensors, which are used in the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy, it could be another profitable branch for Sony’s component business.