3M MPro 110

3M MPro 110 main

3M MPro 110 Photo Gallery

Laptops, cellphones and other portables can shrink only so far before their displays are unusable. 3M decouples screen size from gadget size with the first micro-projector. It can show 50-inch-diagonal images in a dark room and 10-inch images under bright light. The tech debuts bundled with a one-hour battery in the handheld MPro110. By next year, 3M expects to squeeze the projector (itself the size of a matchbox) into cellphones, MP3 players and other gadgets.

3M beat other companies in the pocket-projector race by refining a well-known design instead of developing exotic technologies such as miniature lasers. Like many tabletop projectors, this model uses a set of prisms to direct light from a lamp onto an imaging chip that sets the color and intensity of each pixel in the projection. But rather than using separate lenses around the prisms, 3M molded prisms with rounded edges that act as built-in lenses. To keep power and size down, the projector’s lamp is a one-watt LED with a special lens to concentrate the light beam so that none of it goes to waste.

The 5.4-ounce MPro110 has inputs for laptops, digital cameras and cellphones to display video at standard-definition-TV quality (640 by 480 pixels). So it’s not only a great tool for business presentations, but also the cheapest giant-screen TV. $360; 3m.com

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