Welcome to my unboxing of ASUS's first projector in the North American market.
Now, they've been doing projectors for a while, but this is, you guessed it,
their first in the North American market, which means this is my first
look at an ASUS projector. So, this is the P1. It is a portable LED DLP pocket
projector, which basically means it's got low power consumption. It's got a
good small form factor for traveling. Business presentations in particular are
one of the sort of intended uses for this particular product. I'm going to
just sort of start opening it up and then we'll get a little bit further into
the details that ASUS has on the outside of the box once I've got the accessories
unpacked. This particular one is a is
not a retail not a retail sample. So
that means that it is was already opened
before I got a chance to open it. So, let's have a closer look at the
packaging itself to see what ASUS figures is special about this guy. So,
LED means up to 30,000 hours of lifetime. It also means instant on and
off, so there's no waiting for cool down times and warm-up times. HD resolution,
so that's not full HD, but it's 1280 by 800. It's plenty for a PowerPoint or a
spreadsheet. Auto keystone correction is going to be handy because I'll show you
guys. Oh, well, okay, I'll show you guys after, but it's got instant height adjustment, which means that you instead
of using the little screw on the bottom that you often use to adjust the angle
of the projector, just has a little flip out stand. It is a short throw
projector. So, at a distance of 1 m, so that is about the distance from here to
the wall, I can actually project a 40in image. So, I'm going to show you guys
that afterwards as well. Ultra lightweight. Sure. Got it. And I think
that pretty much covers everything that we've got on the box itself. 200 lumens
brightness. Okay. So, that's pretty that's pretty comparable to other
products in this kind of a product class. Now, this is a cool thing as
well. Check this out. So, the included adapter, I don't know if you you've
you'll notice or not, but that is the same adapter that gets used on the
majority of ASUS notebooks. So you have to make sure that the particular ASUS
notebook is capable of providing enough power. So in this case, you want to make
sure that it's at least a 3.42 amp
adapter, but as long as it's capable of providing enough power, the actual plug
will be compatible. So that's pretty cool, right? We've also got a VGA to
appears to be really that iPhone
adapter. Only one way to find out for sure.
No, hold on a minute, guys. Oh, I hardcore failed there, guys. This is an
input on the projector, and then these are inputs. You've got composite as well
as VGA input to the projector with this
particular cable. So, the other things we see included here are your quick
start guide as well as your disc, whatever you could possibly need that
for, as well as a carrying
case, also included in the package. So,
there you go. It's got your zipper on one side to throw the projector in
there. It's got your zipper on the other side to throw your cables and whatnot in
there. So, that's pretty cool. Now, let's have a look at the projector unit
itself. So, it's very, very small. about the same dimensions as like a uh as a CD
disc case. So that means here, let's go
ahead and I'll throw it in the case so you guys can see what it's going to look
like once it goes in there. So it's this big and then if you're not carrying around any accessories, like maybe you
have your laptop and you're traveling, you got your laptop power adapter. You
make sure your laptop's charged before the meeting. You can just carry the one power adapter, plug that into the
projector once you get all set up, and then run the laptop off battery. So you
won't even have to carry around anything extra. You can just fold up the excess
and it'll be about yay big. Very, very
nice. It actually uses a magnesium alloy
case, which means that without any fans at all, it would appear. That's cool.
Oh, no, wait. We got one. We got one. But it should operate fairly cool and
fairly quiet, especially because it is using an LED light, which means that
there's less heat output from that source, as well as the fact that it has
a heat conductive casing. So, let's look
at the physical aspects of it for a little bit here. So, we've got our focus. Okay, we've got our uh navigation
buttons on here. You know what? I actually have a cheat sheet for all of this. So, yeah, there's your function
keys. Let's see what they all do. Menu, source, and power button. Okay, that's
all there. And then we've got on the bottom view, you can see this is a
sample, not for sale. We have a tripod socket as well as the supporting stand,
which I'll show you in a minute. From the front, we've got the projection lens. No lens cover. That's kind of an
interesting uh thing. I wonder if the retail unit comes with a lens cover. It
probably wouldn't be a bad idea. I'll throw that back to ASUS. Um although, if
you're keeping it in the case, which you probably should, it's got a nice soft
velvety sort of internal. So, as long as nobody walks up to your projector while
you're using it and like goes like that with a quarter or whatever, then you
should be in pretty good shape. And then from the back, you got your Kensington
lock as well as your power adapter. On
this side, we've also got our input. So,
that was for VGA and composite. So, I can show
you guys how that works. You can see it's labeled with this side up. There we
go. And aside from the fairly limited
inputs, I'd say this is more of a convenience product than anything else.
So, no, you're not going to be gaming on it. You're not going to be, you know,
watching HD movies in a home theater. This is a very more uh travel friendly,
practical type of product. So, you go ahead, you flip out the stand like that
because a lot of the time when you aim the projector right on the table, you end up with an image that's uh cut off
by the table itself or too low to really be useful to anybody. So, you go ahead,
you flip out the stand, you put it up like that, and then 1 meter away from
the wall, you should be able to project a 40 40in image. So, we're going to try
that in a minute. And oh, yeah, it has auto keystone,
which means that it'll just adjust using
a sensor in the projector unit itself for how much of an angle it's at and
make sure that it is projecting a flat image at the wall. So, that's pretty cool. Give me a sec here, guys. We're
going to show you the short throw lens that's going on here. So here we are
testing out ASUS's claim that a meter 1
meter away from the wall that's 3 feet for you Yanks 1 meter away from the wall
which is what we are we can achieve a 40 in that is however many centimeters that
is cuz even here in Canada we do TVs in inches a 40in diagonal image we have 41
in so we have met or beaten the
specification however as are Are you
kidding me? No, I'm not paying attention to you
right now.
Um, so sorry, a little flustered now.
Um, so as you can see, the image is quite washed out. Although, if you take
a look at the lights that we have pointing at it, that uh is fairly
obvious why that would be. So, let's try killing one of the lights here. You can
see now we end up with a fairly usable image. So, even in a fairly lit
presentation room, we should be able to bring up some kind of uh document. And
uh Oh, okay. Apparently, Firefox is not
real happy. Sorry, my netbook's pretty slow, so it takes a while to load
things. This is like a first generation netbook. I only really use it when I go
somewhere where I can't bring a real computer. Uh so, google.ca. So, you can
see what sort of text it's going to want. a bilingual keyboard like
ah whatever the price was right at the time. This was as cheap as a computer
got. So there we go. So in a fairly lit environment this is what we can expect.
So even at our 40in size it looks pretty darn good. However, if you're able to
dim the lights it looks significantly better. And supposing you were using the
P1 in a scenario where you actually can
eliminate the lights. All of a sudden,
you end up with a pretty darn bright image considering the form factor of
this projector and the fact that even though we're not in eco mode, so you're
not going to get the 30,000 hours of battery life, uh you'll still get like
well over 10,000 hours of battery life. So that's very very impressive for the
kind of brightness we're getting out of it. In fact, I mean, moving further away
from the wall, I'd say with reasonable
usability, you can get a pretty darn
huge image out of this thing. It starts to get it starts to lose a little bit of
the color here. You can also see the auto keystone working as I tilt it up
and down. You see that? See it making the adjustments. So, that's just me
angling the projector more or less. And
see how it retains somewhat straight
edges no matter what I do to it. So, I'm
just going to go ahead and turn the lights back on for a minute here. And I
think that pretty much wraps it up. I mean, there's the um actually there's a
couple of menu options that are somewhat interesting. So, if you go in here, the
menu is actually very easy to navigate. You've just got your navigation buttons
and then your enter button. So, we'll go ahead and check out some of the splendid
video options. So, you got standard blackboard, whiteboard, dynamic mode.
So, dynamic mode doesn't seem to be that great, but game mode looks pretty sharp.
Scenery mode, theater mode. I wouldn't mind if they had a yellow wall mode
because a lot of presentations are done on walls that are not 100% white. So,
that would have been pretty nice to see included. Uh, you can also adjust things
like the image setting. There you go. So, you can Oh, no, that's not the right
one. Where is it? It's in setup, maybe. Yeah, setup. So, you can set the Aha,
the lamp power. So, high or low. There
you go. So that's the difference between high and low. Actually, I should let you see that with the uh with the lights
more off here. So
high and that's the cat's getting into something. So low and high. Looks just
like that. And I think that pretty much wraps it up here, guys. Press the power
button again to turn off. Look at that. Instant off. Oh, and hey, if I wanted to
turn it on again, I never showed you guys the instant on functionality. It
turns on pretty much instantly. It takes about I think ASUS' spec is 5 seconds to
warm up. So there you go. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look
at the P1 portable LED projector from ASUS. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus
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