projectors

To get rid of the mess of wires from his many videogame consoles, PopSci reader Brian De Vitis decided to repurpose his R2-D2-shaped cooler. The engineering student modified its legs and repainted it to look more realistic. Then he stacked the motherboards from the eight consoles on shelves inside, added a sound system, and rearranged the inputs so he could plug in controllers from the outside. To watch all the gaming action, he added a projector in the rig’s dome, just like the real R2’s.

We’ve come a long way from ye olde slide carousel. Though the idea of click-slide-clicking our way through BBQs and beach vacations is so deliciously Mad Men, it’s not exactly what you’d call “portable.” Nikon’s new Coolpix S1000pj camera, however, is a theater in your pocket. In playback mode, you can open a second lens on the front of the camera that casts images and movie clips as large as 40 inches onto any surface up to 6.5 feet away.

The stunning colors and contrast on the Samsung Show's 3.2-inch OLED screen would be enough to make it a multimedia wonder. But the phone really earns its name from an integrated projector that displays 100-inch images.

Other "pico" projectors are themselves bigger than iPods and attach to a cellphone with a cable. By squeezing a projector into the phone, Samsung ensures that you always have a big screen handy—say, for viewing movies on an airplane seat back or photos on a tabletop.

Details are still fuzzy, but with very little fanfare it appears the world's first cell phone with a built-in projector has arrived. A company called Logic Wireless is claiming a CES debut of The Logic Bolt (in partnership with T-Mobile, no less). The phone has "razor-sharp" projections which can grow its screen size by 3000 percent and still retains a remarkably slim footprint, if the photos are any indication.

Having watched the slow development of pocket projectors for years, I'm thrilled to have not one but two real-life models to play with. 3M's MPro110 ($360) debuted in September and earned a grand award in our Best of What's New roster for 2008. This week, Optoma will start selling the first competing product, its Pico PK-101 projector, for $400.