Projectors

The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show is over, but so many tech news stories, product showcases and software announcements came from the convention that you’re almost guaranteed to have missed something. If you take a look at our wrap up guides, you just might catch up on something you overlooked. Here’s everything we saw — and loved — at CES 2012.

CES 2012: Best in Show

The Annual Best of CES Awards
Here are the show’s standout products in 13 categories including the best smartphone, laptop, tablet, auto technology and accessory to surface in an unending swell of new gadgets.

Reader’s Choice Award 
The Best of CES Awards spotlights our editors’ top picks from the annual convention, but this year our readers had a decidedly different take on the single hottest piece of new tech.  

CES 2012: The Hottest Products

Best Laptops of CES 2012
Seven of these 8 clamshells fell short of a Best of CES Award, but they certainly garnered their fair share of time in the spotlight. Check out the laptops we eagerly look forward to reviewing this year.  

Best Smart Phones of CES 2012
The show’s smartphone announcements include a big step forward for Windows Phone, larger-than-ever screen sizes and phone cameras with the best specs we’ve encountered.

Best Tablets of CES 2012
This year’s tablets will offer longer battery life, lower prices and clearer screen resolutions.

CES 2012: The Biggest News Stories, Our Commentary and Live Video Coverage

Top 10 Videos of CES 2012
Some tech you have to see for yourself, like the Tobii Gaze Interface which, someday, will take hands-free to a whole new level by allowing you to navigate a computer screen just by looking at it. 

CES 2012: Biggest News Stories
CES doubles as a town hall for the world’s most successful tech companies to make huge announcements. This year, Microsoft embarked on its last CES keynote address and Intel announced partnerships to build smart phones with Lenova and Motorola.

SpoonFed: Top 5 Things I Learned at CES 2012
CES is too big to leave without thoughts on the long-view of tech. LAPTOP Editor-in-Chief Mark Spoonauer learned that despite Ultrabooks’  lionshare of limelight at the show, hybrid Android tablets that connect to keyboard docks could be a bigger trend. 

CES 2012: How Our Staff’s Mobile Gear Performed
We armed ourselves with some of the best gadgets of 2011 and tested them in the fast-paced halls of North American’s largest tech show. Check above to see how the MacBook Air 13, ASUS Zenbook UX31 Ultrabook, Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone and other favorite gadgets performed in action. 

MSI showed off a tablet with a projector built into its top edge at CES this year. Looking at the size of the device’s “brain”,  it’s a wonder anyone missed it.

Alas, TBreak.com did not, and has now outed the device.  As you can see , the tablet runs Windows 7 and the projector can be rotated to face front or back . What you can’t see, however, is the heavy-duty hinge on the hybrid’s backside that’s needed to support this beast.

There are no details on specs or other features, but, in Tbreak.com’s video, an MSI rep does mention a projector-based keyboard input system somewhat akin to (or based on) touch-sensitive holographic laser projections like this one.

If you’re excited for the convergence of projector and tablet technology, you’ll be happy to know that HP recently discussed plans to sell a line of mini-projectors. The company even said to Digitimes that “it is not difficult” to integrate a rotating mini-projector onto a tablet in the spot where webcams are typically housed, though it expressed no plans to do so.

To see the MSI tablet-projector in action, check out TBreak.com.

Via Tbreak.com and Engadget

Now you’ve  got more to thank Texas Instruments for than that TI-89 calculator that got you through geometry class. Today, the company announced a DLP HD chipset that will enable 1366 x 768-pixel video in pico projectors and other mobile devices. When projected onto a wall, the 16:9 aspect ratio video will span a 100-inch “screen”.

The projectors will be released by more than 20 companies including Acer, Cinepic, Dell, Fujitsu, iGO, and Samsung.  Like a proud tech innovator, Texas Instruments will be showing off the new pico projector technology as well as other devices with the picos built-in–such as smart phones (like this one), cameras, and camcorders with the attached projectors on the back–here at CES. We’ll be there for hands-on time.

Oh, Black Friday. You are a crazy affair.  Early wake-up calls. Cold mornings. Long lines. Rabid shoppers. If only there was some way to avoid you! Oh wait. How about shopping online? Thanks, Amazon!

In celebration of the unlatching of the holiday shopping floodgates, web-only retailer Amazon has gathered its Black Friday deals into an convenient, online hub for couch-bound shoppers. Those who visit www.amazon.com/blackfriday between now and Cyber Monday will find notebooks, smart phones, electronic accessories, DVDs, Blu-rays, MP3s, and more, much of it cut-down by as much as 50% for the holidays.

At the forefront of the hub are spotlighted daily deals  and what Amazon calls Lightning offers that activate and expire at a given time. And for iPhone owners who will brave the cold and the crowds on Friday morning, Amazon has released Price Check by Amazon in the App Store so that brick-and-mortar shoppers can consult the online seller for better prices on gadgets they may otherwise splurge on in a real-world store.

Curious about whether the deals at Amazon.com/blackfriday are worth it? Here are some highlights. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, ViewSonic announced the DVP5 Pocket Camcorder Projector, a device that, like its name suggests, smushes a camcorder and a pico projector into one. Talk about convergence!

Design-wise, the DVP5 isn’t the most exciting of products, but it’s not ugly, either. The front has a low-resolution screen, but highly responsive, backlit touch controls.

On the whole, the DVP5 isn’t the greatest pico projector, nor is it the best digital camcorder. But you get the two functions in the same device, so that’s got to count for something, right?

Priced at $329, it costs about the same as most other pico projectors–only you also get a camera, too. It’s ideal for those who crave instant gratification: You can film someone doing  something, and then show it to them right after they’ve done it. It’s a fun little device, and should tide consumers over until pico projectors in smart phones–remember the LG Expo?–become standard.

You can check out our full review of the DVP5  here. and hit the jump to see a hands-on video.

As tech-savvy consumers fresh out of the aughts, most of us are unlikely to be impressed by new touch interfaces. But researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University have something remarkable up their sleeve with Skinput, a bio-acoustic sensing technology that allows our body to be used as a large finger-input surface without any electronics touching the skin.

Though the average adult possesses approximately two square meters of external surface area, it may have never occurred to you that this space could act as a way to control the devices you carry around. Chris Harrison, however, a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon and one of the primary researchers for Skinput, believes the easy accessibility of our various limbs is quite conducive to such interactions.

When a finger taps the skin, the impact creates a variety of acoustic signals that travel through its surface. To capture and harness these signals, Harrison and his team created a special purpose bio-acoustic sensing array armband, accompanied by software that listens for skin surface impacts and classifies them appropriately. Variations in bone density, size, and mass, along with filtering effects from soft tissues and joints means different body locations are acoustically unique; the current Skinput prototype is built to gather signals from a user’s arms and hands.

Just how accurate can tapping on your arm be? “In our user study, we evaluated several input location sets, which demonstrated our approach could achieve accuracy as high as 95.5 percent for five locations, a sufficient number of buttons for many mobile interactions,” said Harrison. An audio player or portable PC, for example, could be controlled simply by tapping various fingers together.

Skinput is also capable of turning your body into a touchscreen of sorts. Harrison’s team outfitted its prototype with a Microvision pico projector, transforming a user’s arms into virtual buttons that respond in real time to various inputs.

While this technology is at least ten years away from being commercialized, its successful implementation could change the way we interact with the web and our data.

Pico projectors came into their own in 2009, but 2010 looks to see the technology penetrate all manner of devices. At CES Unveiled, a showcase featuring dozens of vendors showcasing their latest wares, we had the opportunity to see new pico projectors powered by Texas Instrument’s DLP technology, as well as new, experimental prototypes and devices.

The most intriguing was an unnamed Samsung phone that featured a pico projector (the follow up the the Asia-only W7900) embedded into its top. Despite have a projector built right into it, the cell was remarkably lightweight and felt good in hand. We beamed a video from the phone to the table, wall, and floor, and enjoyed a surprisingly detailed image with rich colors. It’s powered by Texas Instrument’s new DLP Pico chipset that delivers a sharp, DVD-quality 854 x 480-pixel resolution.

A release date hasn’t been decided, but we’re hoping to see this Sasmung phone appear on American shores as it could eliminate the need to lug full size projectors.

The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Intel Corp today charging the chip maker with “illegally [using] its dominant market position… to stifle competition and strengthen its monopoly.” This comes after an almost four year long probe into Intel’s practices. In 2006 the FTC started the process with an informal inquiry, spurred on by the American Antitrust Institute. In June of 2008 the FTC moved on to the next step, a formal probe, and issued a subpoena to Intel. Since that time Intel and the FTC have apparently been attempting to settle the case, but according to Intel senior vice president and general counsel Doug Melamed, the FTC “insisted on unprecedented remedies” that stalled talks and led to today’s filing.

The FTC alleges that Intel isn’t just being competitive in the market but unfairly hampering other CPU makers (AMD being the only serious competition, according to the FTC) by either threatening or rewarding computer vendors to keep them from buying other CPUs. The suit also alleges Intel redesigned their compiler to actively hamper the performance of non-Intel chips (instead of the compiler simply working better with Intel chips, a subtle but important difference).

Intel’s response to the lawsuit is that it has done nothing wrong. It also included an allegation that the FTC didn’t investigate some of the claims against Intel before filing and tacked them on just before. Though they aren’t explicit, I wonder if these are the same Section 2 “tag along” claims that Commissioner Rosch dissented on in his Concurring and Dissenting Statement (PDF).

Should the FTC win this suit, how much will the CPU landscape change? Will it resemble the current GPU landscape which, according to the FTC, is in danger of being taken over by Intel in a similar fashion to their CPU dominance? It will be years before the dust settles, but hopefully the court filings and procedures will give us a glimpse into the competitive world of computer processors.

There are many great projectors out there, but not all of them come with great remotes. Yours may be plagued with a lack of laser pointer, a short range, or run out of juice without warning. Enter the Logitech Wireless Presenter R400. This stylish presentation remote has a great feel, a plug-and-play USB dongle, and a range of at least 120 feet. You can even start a slideshow or blank the screen at a distance. The only drawback is that the R400 isn’t completely Mac-compatible.

Check out our roundup to find other remotes that will work on both PC and Mac and include more features you won’t find on most standard presentation remotes.

Today, Casio unveiled the XJ-S43W, the newest member of its Super Slim projector line. Designed as a combo of high-brightness and portability, the XJ-S43W features 2,500 ANSI lumens and weighs just 3.96 pounds. Some of the other features  of this 10.6 x 7.8 x 1.2-inch projector include:

• Native 1,280 x 800-pixel resolution (widescreen)
• An estimated lamp life of 2,000 hours
• 1,800:1 contrast ratio
• 18-inch to 300-inch projection size
• A 30-foor projection range
• 16.77 million colors
• 2X power zoom
• “Direct power On/Off” functions for reducing set-up and take down times
• HDMI, mini D-Sub connections, 3.5mm mini-jack connections
• Monoaural sound

The $999 projector will be available for purchase in September.