Last year saw the launch by Korean company ESPlus of a new micro/pico projector called Seeser which uses laser technology from MicroVision, in this case, the PicoP display engine. The advantages of laser technology are that colours are, in theory, more vivid compared to competing technologies and there's no need to (manually) refocus the projector's lens as it is the case for rivals. The product's website claims that the projector has a brightness of up to 25 lumen, a contrast ratio of 1000:1, a display resolution of up to 800 x 480 pixels, with projection distances of up to 200cm and a screen size of up to 100in.
Other features include a battery life of up to 20,000 hours, a 2200mAh battery, a thickness of 20mm and a weight of 149g. Perhaps the most surprising bit though is the fact that it comes with runs on a single core Cortex-A8 based Freescale iMX processor clocked at 1GHz that runs Android 2.2 Froyo. There's a microSD card slot, an integrated tuner ISDB-T 1seg, 3.5mm socket, an antenna and a pretty user interface but there's no touchscreen capabilities and no access to Google Play. The Seeser could turn out to be a rather exciting product as it could combine what is essentially Google TV with a potent projector. The only unknowns are when it will be available, at what price and what peripherals - other than the PS2 controller and RGB/Composite IOs we saw - can be connected. A keyboard and mouse would be great.
We briefly played with a sample at the 8th Korea Communications Conference press party in Seoul. The chap we chatted to declined to tell us more about pricing but confirmed that a new version will come out by the end of the year, hopefully with a proper display. But then, it will be interesting to see how it compares to the Samsung Galaxy Beam.
