Carry it in your palm

: As a child I had the good fortune of being able to spend some of my adolescent years in an army cantonment. I still remember the soldiers in their olive fatigues and shining rifles, the rumbling of the big guns and the clatter of the formidable tanks. The other thing I still remember as clearly, are those weekend evenings when a huge white cloth-screen used to be stretched on a wooden frame and erected on two large poles in the middle of the lawns in front of the Quarter Guard. A projector used to be placed on a large table just behind the sofas. At the fall of the dusk, after the ‘roll-call’ we all used to gather there, and a feature film was screened. The tiny projector used to entertain the whole battalion (more than 5,000 people) at one go. That was the might of the projector then and, even today it holds a prestigious place of honour in the galaxy of gadgets.

Vivitek Corporation, a well known name in multimedia display solutions including digital projectors, rear projection and 3D displays, recently launched their palm-size portable digital projector D220 series, Vivitek D220MX in India.

Though Vivitek D220MX is small in size (195mm X 162mm X 53mm) and weighs merely 900 gram but it is powerful and has advanced functions. The all-plastic body is finished in dual-tone metallic silver gray. The front bezel houses the projection lens with wide focusing ring, a ‘front IR receiver’ window and a big grill for ventilation. The top plate has a knurled ring for zoom control, two LEDs to show power-on and status, and five control/function buttons. On the rear bezel Vivitek has provided the power-in socket, the ‘rear IR receiver’ window and four (mini USB, mini audio-in jack, video/S-video and DVI-I) interface sockets. To safe guard the projector, a slot is also provided to secure it with a ‘Kingston cable lock’.

Setting up the projector is easy. Just connect the projector with the suitable cable to your laptop/PC or DVD player and it will detect the source on its own as you power it ON. The built-in auto image optimisation function auto sizes and adjusts images for the optimum picture quality. On the base of the projector there is a height-adjuster pod that pops-out on the press of a button to adjust the level of the projector. The 1024 X 768 native resolution (scalable to 1280...