ASUS P1 Mini 1280x800 LED Data Projector Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,168 words · ~10 min read
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Welcome to my unboxing of ASUS's first projector in the North American market.
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Now, they've been doing projectors for a while, but this is, you guessed it,
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their first in the North American market, which means this is my first
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look at an ASUS projector. So, this is the P1. It is a portable LED DLP pocket
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projector, which basically means it's got low power consumption. It's got a
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good small form factor for traveling. Business presentations in particular are
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one of the sort of intended uses for this particular product. I'm going to
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just sort of start opening it up and then we'll get a little bit further into
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the details that ASUS has on the outside of the box once I've got the accessories
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unpacked. This particular one is a is
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not a retail not a retail sample. So
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that means that it is was already opened
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before I got a chance to open it. So, let's have a closer look at the
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packaging itself to see what ASUS figures is special about this guy. So,
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LED means up to 30,000 hours of lifetime. It also means instant on and
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off, so there's no waiting for cool down times and warm-up times. HD resolution,
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so that's not full HD, but it's 1280 by 800. It's plenty for a PowerPoint or a
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spreadsheet. Auto keystone correction is going to be handy because I'll show you
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guys. Oh, well, okay, I'll show you guys after, but it's got instant height adjustment, which means that you instead
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of using the little screw on the bottom that you often use to adjust the angle
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of the projector, just has a little flip out stand. It is a short throw
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projector. So, at a distance of 1 m, so that is about the distance from here to
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the wall, I can actually project a 40in image. So, I'm going to show you guys
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that afterwards as well. Ultra lightweight. Sure. Got it. And I think
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that pretty much covers everything that we've got on the box itself. 200 lumens
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brightness. Okay. So, that's pretty that's pretty comparable to other
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products in this kind of a product class. Now, this is a cool thing as
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well. Check this out. So, the included adapter, I don't know if you you've
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you'll notice or not, but that is the same adapter that gets used on the
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majority of ASUS notebooks. So you have to make sure that the particular ASUS
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notebook is capable of providing enough power. So in this case, you want to make
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sure that it's at least a 3.42 amp
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adapter, but as long as it's capable of providing enough power, the actual plug
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will be compatible. So that's pretty cool, right? We've also got a VGA to
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appears to be really that iPhone
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adapter. Only one way to find out for sure.
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No, hold on a minute, guys. Oh, I hardcore failed there, guys. This is an
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input on the projector, and then these are inputs. You've got composite as well
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as VGA input to the projector with this
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particular cable. So, the other things we see included here are your quick
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start guide as well as your disc, whatever you could possibly need that
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for, as well as a carrying
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case, also included in the package. So,
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there you go. It's got your zipper on one side to throw the projector in
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there. It's got your zipper on the other side to throw your cables and whatnot in
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there. So, that's pretty cool. Now, let's have a look at the projector unit
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itself. So, it's very, very small. about the same dimensions as like a uh as a CD
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disc case. So that means here, let's go
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ahead and I'll throw it in the case so you guys can see what it's going to look
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like once it goes in there. So it's this big and then if you're not carrying around any accessories, like maybe you
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have your laptop and you're traveling, you got your laptop power adapter. You
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make sure your laptop's charged before the meeting. You can just carry the one power adapter, plug that into the
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projector once you get all set up, and then run the laptop off battery. So you
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won't even have to carry around anything extra. You can just fold up the excess
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and it'll be about yay big. Very, very
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nice. It actually uses a magnesium alloy
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case, which means that without any fans at all, it would appear. That's cool.
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Oh, no, wait. We got one. We got one. But it should operate fairly cool and
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fairly quiet, especially because it is using an LED light, which means that
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there's less heat output from that source, as well as the fact that it has
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a heat conductive casing. So, let's look
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at the physical aspects of it for a little bit here. So, we've got our focus. Okay, we've got our uh navigation
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buttons on here. You know what? I actually have a cheat sheet for all of this. So, yeah, there's your function
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keys. Let's see what they all do. Menu, source, and power button. Okay, that's
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all there. And then we've got on the bottom view, you can see this is a
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sample, not for sale. We have a tripod socket as well as the supporting stand,
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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
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interesting uh thing. I wonder if the retail unit comes with a lens cover. It
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probably wouldn't be a bad idea. I'll throw that back to ASUS. Um although, if
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you're keeping it in the case, which you probably should, it's got a nice soft
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velvety sort of internal. So, as long as nobody walks up to your projector while
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you're using it and like goes like that with a quarter or whatever, then you
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should be in pretty good shape. And then from the back, you got your Kensington
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lock as well as your power adapter. On
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this side, we've also got our input. So,
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that was for VGA and composite. So, I can show
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you guys how that works. You can see it's labeled with this side up. There we
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go. And aside from the fairly limited
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inputs, I'd say this is more of a convenience product than anything else.
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So, no, you're not going to be gaming on it. You're not going to be, you know,
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watching HD movies in a home theater. This is a very more uh travel friendly,
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practical type of product. So, you go ahead, you flip out the stand like that
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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
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by the table itself or too low to really be useful to anybody. So, you go ahead,
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you flip out the stand, you put it up like that, and then 1 meter away from
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the wall, you should be able to project a 40 40in image. So, we're going to try
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that in a minute. And oh, yeah, it has auto keystone,
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which means that it'll just adjust using
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a sensor in the projector unit itself for how much of an angle it's at and
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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
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going to show you the short throw lens that's going on here. So here we are
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testing out ASUS's claim that a meter 1
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meter away from the wall that's 3 feet for you Yanks 1 meter away from the wall
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which is what we are we can achieve a 40 in that is however many centimeters that
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is cuz even here in Canada we do TVs in inches a 40in diagonal image we have 41
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in so we have met or beaten the
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specification however as are Are you
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kidding me? No, I'm not paying attention to you
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right now.
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Um, so sorry, a little flustered now.
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Um, so as you can see, the image is quite washed out. Although, if you take
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a look at the lights that we have pointing at it, that uh is fairly
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obvious why that would be. So, let's try killing one of the lights here. You can
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see now we end up with a fairly usable image. So, even in a fairly lit
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presentation room, we should be able to bring up some kind of uh document. And
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uh Oh, okay. Apparently, Firefox is not
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real happy. Sorry, my netbook's pretty slow, so it takes a while to load
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things. This is like a first generation netbook. I only really use it when I go
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somewhere where I can't bring a real computer. Uh so, google.ca. So, you can
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see what sort of text it's going to want. a bilingual keyboard like
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ah whatever the price was right at the time. This was as cheap as a computer
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got. So there we go. So in a fairly lit environment this is what we can expect.
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So even at our 40in size it looks pretty darn good. However, if you're able to
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dim the lights it looks significantly better. And supposing you were using the
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P1 in a scenario where you actually can
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eliminate the lights. All of a sudden,
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you end up with a pretty darn bright image considering the form factor of
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this projector and the fact that even though we're not in eco mode, so you're
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not going to get the 30,000 hours of battery life, uh you'll still get like
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well over 10,000 hours of battery life. So that's very very impressive for the
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kind of brightness we're getting out of it. In fact, I mean, moving further away
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from the wall, I'd say with reasonable
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usability, you can get a pretty darn
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huge image out of this thing. It starts to get it starts to lose a little bit of
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the color here. You can also see the auto keystone working as I tilt it up
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and down. You see that? See it making the adjustments. So, that's just me
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angling the projector more or less. And
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see how it retains somewhat straight
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edges no matter what I do to it. So, I'm
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just going to go ahead and turn the lights back on for a minute here. And I
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think that pretty much wraps it up. I mean, there's the um actually there's a
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couple of menu options that are somewhat interesting. So, if you go in here, the
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menu is actually very easy to navigate. You've just got your navigation buttons
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and then your enter button. So, we'll go ahead and check out some of the splendid
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video options. So, you got standard blackboard, whiteboard, dynamic mode.
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So, dynamic mode doesn't seem to be that great, but game mode looks pretty sharp.
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Scenery mode, theater mode. I wouldn't mind if they had a yellow wall mode
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because a lot of presentations are done on walls that are not 100% white. So,
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that would have been pretty nice to see included. Uh, you can also adjust things
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like the image setting. There you go. So, you can Oh, no, that's not the right
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one. Where is it? It's in setup, maybe. Yeah, setup. So, you can set the Aha,
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the lamp power. So, high or low. There
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you go. So that's the difference between high and low. Actually, I should let you see that with the uh with the lights
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more off here. So
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high and that's the cat's getting into something. So low and high. Looks just
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like that. And I think that pretty much wraps it up here, guys. Press the power
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button again to turn off. Look at that. Instant off. Oh, and hey, if I wanted to
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turn it on again, I never showed you guys the instant on functionality. It
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turns on pretty much instantly. It takes about I think ASUS' spec is 5 seconds to
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warm up. So there you go. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look
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at the P1 portable LED projector from ASUS. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus
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