Best portable multimedia projector to display vectorworks

[geoform]

Our local user group; Twin Cities Vectorworks Exchange, is looking into purchasing a pico projector for use in our monthly meetings. We've narrowed the choices to two: BenQ Joybee GP1 and Optoma PK301. Both feature led "lamps" which have very long service lives, but only produce 100 and 50 lumens respectively (compared to 2000+ lumens for a typical business projector). Still, we're confident that with our small group and the ability to control the light levels in our meeting rooms, this should be enough.

They're both currently available for $399.00 so that's not a factor, although the BenQ is typically a more expensive unit. We're going to test out each of the projectors first hand (running Vectorworks from both Mac and PC laptops) in the coming week, but I wondered if anyone has used either of these and had comments beyond what might be obvious from our tests. Or, if you've had experience with another pico projector you think we should be considering, please let me know.

If anyone's interested, add a comment to this post and I can report what we learned and what we decided. Both projectors seem to be highly rated (as far as pico projectors are concerned at least) and seem to work with all kinds of input (photos, gaming, movies). There just isn't much information about their suitability for displaying CAD. We've had good success with standard-issue projectors displaying Vectorworks, but given the cost of the units, and the potential cost of replacing a standard projector bulb, we thought the pico/led would be the best long term solution for us.

I apologize if this topic is in the wrong place, or has already been brought up, I just couldn't find it anywhere on our boards.

Thanks, John Moe

[Pat Stanford]

I don't think any of the pico projectors will have enough resolution to be useful with VW.

Anything less than 1024x768 will not run properly as far as I know.

Anything less than 1280x800 will be painful to run.

I think all the pico projectors top out at 640x480 or lower.

Sorry.

[Bruce Kieffer]

Pat,

We plan to go test the PK301 tomorrow. The spex say it is 1280 x 800. We'll report our results back here.

[Pat Stanford]

Good luck. The PC Mag review says it has only a 854x640 native resolution.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363052,00.asp

[geoform]

Thanks Pat and Bruce;

Yes, the pico projectors seem underpowered in a lot of ways, and yet people are playing movies with them, or even gaming. I think for our group, we should at least test them out. I can't seem to find a retailer in the Twin Cities that has the BenQ Joybee GP1 to test, which is too bad because the price drop on the unit makes it a dead-on comparison with the PK301. We'll see what the PK301 can do, and go from there.

[Bruce Kieffer]

Here's the results of our test of the PK301 at BestBuy yesterday. We believe it would be a fine for our VWX (Vectorworks Exchange) user group meetings. The resolution, size of output, and connectivity are all good. If there's one weakness, it would be brightness. We plan to test it and hopefully another from BenQ at our 9/28 meeting.