Article in the Verge

The Verge   (Way More at the Source)

Joel Johnson used to be a gadget blogger for places like Gizmodo, Wired, and Boing Boing, but now is trying to buy a farm.

Every so often, a glimmer of the old Sony shines through. The Sony that made delightful metal hexahedrons that did amazing things with at least one glaring mistake that made the whole endeavor even more glorious. I have found another one, and it's called the MP-CL1.

It's a pico projector — you know, those things that seem like they'll be good someday, but are squint-inducing trash right now. Except this one, which is extremely good. It uses lasers—or a laser — to project an image that is always in focus and, despite a "low" lumen rating of around 32, looks so, so good when you're using it.

There's some sort of gadget bro science that says the light coming out of the MP-CL1's lens, which is using a chip licensed from a company called MicroVision, appear to be brighter than light coming out of other, similar pico projector apertures that use things like DLP. I don't know if that's actually true, but I know this: at night, with the lights off, the image this little box makes looks incredible. Damn near as good as a regular LCD panel. At night with some ambient light it's watchable, but not great. During the day the projected image is infuriating garbage.

Every review of this little box compares it to other projectors, which is maddening. (The only fair comparison would be the PicoPro, which licenses the same technology, which I haven't used, but am sure is also awesome.) Yeah, it sucks during the day. It's a projector! But this one fits in your pocket and runs on a battery and doesn't need to be focused and lets you hold it in your hand and shoot movies onto the silvered undersides of leaves!