Come on, admit it: is there anything more awesome than miniaturisation?
Enormous feats of shrinkage don’t come along very often, so when they do you sit up and take notice – as you will the first time you see the US$430 (RM1,545) Optoma Pico projector, which is about the size of a cell phone at 5.1 centimetres by 10.4cm by 1.8cm and weighs in at about 120 grams.

The Pico pocket projector with a video iPod weighs about 120g and produces a bright, clear, vivid video or still image.

Regular projectors, of course, are big, heavy, expensive, sometimes noisy machines. They’re standard equipment in corporate boardrooms where PowerPoint jockeys hold sway, in classrooms or auditoriums, or mounted to the ceiling in home theatres, where they provide extra-large movie-watching goodness.

But there are lots of times when a 100-inch screen is overkill – and yet a two-inch iPod screen doesn’t quite cut it. Those are the times when you need something in between. In those situations, a completely silent, ridiculously simple micro-projector such as the Pico really shines.

You’d have to be a jaded gizmophile not to be impressed the first time you turn on this tiny, shiny black box. In the centre of the short end, there’s a bright light-emitting diode lamp. Inside, there’s a miniaturised Texas Instruments digital light processing chip, similar in principle to the ones that drive some full-sized high-definition TV sets. Together, they produce an astonishingly bright, clear, vivid video or still image. That’s right – from a projector you’ve pulled from your jeans pocket.

There are no footnotes for that jeans-pocket statement either because the Pico can run on battery power. Each charge lasts for about 90 minutes – longer if you use the lower brightness setting or when you’re playing video without sound. You can recharge the projector either from its power cord or from a computer’s universal serial bus jack. A spare battery comes with the projector, and so does a little drawstring carrying bag.

A pocket-sized, self-contained projector changes all the rules. An iPod and a Pico – that’s the entire setup. Now, for the first time, a tent wall can become a movie screen when you’re out camping.

Let’s be clear: no pocket projector is going to produce as much brightness as tabletop projectors 10 times its size. The Pico manages nine lumens (that’s how they measure the brightness of such things as projectors), compared with, for example, 2,000 lumens for a US$900 tabletop projector. That may not sound like much, but it’s plenty bright at the Pico’s shorter distances and smaller “screen” sizes.

The minimum distance for this projector is about 20cm from your “screen”; the maximum is 2.6 metres away, at which point you get a 65-inch image. And it really helps if you dim the lights or use a properly reflective movie screen.

You can sit this little gizmo on your airplane tray table and project onto the seat back in front of you. You get a dazzlingly bright, sharp, vivid video image about a foot across, so you and your immediate seatmates can all watch.

Or you can park the projector on a little tripod – it comes with a tiny, screw-in tripod adapter – and project tonight’s dorm-room Wii marathon onto a bed sheet. There’s no keystone adjustment to compensate for when the projector is facing the screen at an angle. The 20,000-hour bulb is not replaceable. And the picture resolution is only 480 by 320 pixels – on paper, much coarser than the 1,024 by 768 pixels (or higher) resolution of a tabletop projector. But you know what? Pixels are over-rated. Nobody will complain about the sharpness of the Pico’s image, especially after you find just the right spot on its little Focus dial. So, what can you watch on this thing? It comes with a special composite cable. On one end, there’s a special, tiny audio-video pin that goes into the projector. On the other end, you’ll find the familiar three-headed, red-white-yellow RCA cables. These are female jacks, made to mate with the male composite cables that come with just about every DVD player, video cassette recorder, game console, digital camera and camcorder ever sold.

So, in a pinch, the Pico could replace a TV set when you’re using full-sizef gear such as DVD players or game consoles.

But the true mission of the Pico’s miraculous miniaturisation is connecting to fellow micro-gadgets: digital cameras, cell phones, iPods or iPhones, for example.

The necessary adapter for the iPod or iPhone comes with the projector. Old video iPods require only the short black cable, which goes into the iPod’s headphone jack but carries both audio and video. You also get a plastic nub that snaps onto the bottom of the iPhone or more recent iPods; the short black cable connects the nub to the projector. To connect a digital camera, so you can show off your stills or videos, or to connect your camcorder, you use the composite TV cable that comes with it. Optoma plans to make adapter cables available for other smartphones in the coming months. The Pico does so much so well with so little that it might sound ungrateful to bring up its one really embarrassing shortfall. But somebody has to say it: What about the sound? The Pico has a built-in speaker, yes, but it’s about the size of a hydrogen atom. With the iPod volume cranked to full, the Pico puts out about as much volume as you ordinarily hear leaking from earbuds on somebody sitting next to you.

Simply put, the projector is as bad with audio as it is good with video.

If you’re using an iPod, iPhone or cell phone, your last, best hope is the headphone jack. You can listen through earbuds, of course, although that’s not much of a communal experience. Or you can connect that headphone jack to a portable speaker – but now, of course, you’ve got a much more complex rack of gear, and you’re way beyond the realm of jeans pockets.

Even so, the Pico is the first of its kind – other micro-projectors are on the way – and overall, it’s awesome.