Modular Projector Delivers Portability Without Compromise

Proxima's affordable UltraLight X350 XGA projector is light, bright, and just right for road warriors.

Richard Jantz, special to PCWorld.com

If your business involves road-show presentations, small lectures, and group training, you want a data projector that's as easy to tote as your notebook PC. Until recently, however, choosing an ultraportable projector over a heavier model required sacrifices in image quality, brightness, and other features.

But a new projector that offers portability without those compromises is coming to town: Proxima's UltraLight X350. This sleek unit, expected to sell for about $4999 on the street when it ships in December, is the newest ultraportable projector with a native XGA (1024-by-768) resolution to incorporate Texas Instruments' latest generation of Digital Light Processing microchip technology. DLP uses a small-scale reflective system with thousands of tiny mirrors to project the image, while competing LCD projectors use larger panels, prisms, and mirrors. The result: DLP units tend to project images that are brighter overall, while LCD models generally deliver richer, more saturated colors.

Correction: The paragraph above was modified on November 20, 2000, to correct an error.--Editors

I tested what Proxima described as an "early engineering version." As is common with such sample versions, certain features had not been finalized. But I still found plenty of reasons to recommend the UltraLight X350 to the digital nomads who travel the world to deliver presentations.

Impressive Features

Weighing just 3.5 pounds and measuring only 7.12 inches wide, 2.36 inches high, and 8.42 inches long, the UltraLight X350 is lighter than a half-gallon carton of milk and smaller than most of the notebooks it's designed to accompany. Even with its 7.4-pound traveling weight (projector plus carrying case and cables), it's extremely portable.

Although the UltraLight X350 is a tad heavier than sub-3-pound models, it's the first unit among recent sub-5-pound models I've seen that boasts a powerful 1100 ANSI lumens of brightness. (ANSI lumens is an industry standard rating that measures the amount of light a projector puts out.) To deliver that formidable brightness, the UltraLight X350 uses a 120-watt Ultra High Performance lamp with a projected life of 2000 hours. The wattage and the lamp life are fairly standard among projectors in this projector's class. (Replacement lamps cost $429.)

The UltraLight X350's closest competitors are the Philips UGO X-Lite and Plus U3-1080; both are 2.86-pound units that also feature DLP technology and XGA resolution, yet they deliver only 800 ANSI lumens of brightness and carry a higher street price of $5899. The UltraLight X350, only marginally heavier, is a better choice for projecting bright images in partially lit rooms (so your audience can take notes) as well as in larger rooms for bigger crowds.

Another feature that distinguishes the UltraLight X350 from most others in its class is its modular design, which allows you to take only the components you need for your presentations. The basic unit includes ports for hooking up the projector to a PC's VGA or Digital Visual Interface (DVI/I) port to project images from the computer, and a Universal Serial Bus port for using the bundled wireless remote control to manipulate the mouse pointer.

A separate video module snaps on to the back of the unit and adds sound and video (composite and S-Video) inputs to the projector, as well as a half pound to its weight and 2 inches to its length. Proxima reports that the video module will be included free until December 31, but will cost an extra $250 thereafter. The unit will not ship with dedicated HDTV capability, but Proxima reports that a higher-end video module with HDTV support will be available in the first half of next year.

Road Test

I tested the UltraLight X350 with a 500-MHz Pentium III notebook and projected PowerPoint presentations, digital photos, and other test images onto a 50-inch screen and onto a highly reflective white wall, at distances of 3 to 15 feet. I also used it to project video images and play sound by hooking it up to a TV tuner and S-Video VCR. All in all, the UltraLight X350 projected impressive images, with bright, clear color. In an informal, side-by-side comparison with the Philips UGO X-Lite, the UltraLight X350's projected images were consistently brighter and sharper, though the color saturation and contrast were about the same.

I also tested the UltraLight X350's ability to resize and project images ranging from VGA (640-by-480) to SXGA (1280-by-1024) resolution, which it accomplished without any major distortion. For accessing other projector functions, such as image source selection and menus (to adjust brightness, contrast, color, and such), I found most of the unit's top-panel buttons and remote control easy to use.

I did run into one glitch in during the tests: The projector's high-temperature warning light came on after just 20 minutes. Heat can be a big issue with projectors, but Proxima says that it's aware of the issue and that it has already fixed the problem in production units. The other Proxima projectors we've tested haven't exhibited such a problem.

Considering that the Proxima UltraLight X350 costs $1000 less and delivers a brighter image than do its closest competitors (the Philips and Plus projectors), it gets my vote as the best ultraportable DLP-based projector I've seen to date.