Geekwire LP-4: Low-Cost, Mini-Projector

To test it out, I put the picture to the closest grey concrete wall (any blemishes are from the wall, not the projector). It fires up in about five seconds, which is refreshing compared to the two minutes' warm-up time of the projectors in my old university. The shut-down takes about half a second.

To start the benchmarks, presenting a picture showing the contrast with lights on. This small hero is clearly only for things done in the dark, and so the room was dimmed for all later tests.

At a distance of 2.5 meters, the picture was 75 cm wide. The sharpness, contrast and general quality were acceptable. This being a LCD projector, the projector issue I'm sensitive to, DLP color wheels being visible, was obviously not present.

With no input connected, the default screen gives us a menu with four options: video, pictures, text, and music. These four types can be played from USB sticks and SD/SDHC cards. An ext2-formatted USB stick was tried, with this projector very likely running Linux internally, but alas, it wasn't to be. I had to resort to FAT32.

A standard assortment of settings are offered: color warmth, contrast, brightness. The sound tab offers default volume tuning, while the time tab controls auto-power off as well as timed power-on.

For kicks, I first put on a PNG HDTV test image, from the first Google hit. The colors display surprisingly well for a projector of this class, blacks are black and whites almost grey. Meanwhile, the text is completely unreadable - a result of the device's built-in scaler.

The pause is due to the picture function being a slideshow, with various effects. Even with only one picture on the stick, it faded, moved and transformed into itself every few seconds.