Everything Broke

#Projector #OldStuff #Review

I bought a projector. It’s an Optoma PK301.

If you were addicted to checking Woot during the late 00’s you might remember these little Optoma pico projectors regularly appearing. I wanted one very badly back then but just couldn’t justify it. They were kinda pricey, of very limited utility, and I just didn’t have much spending money back then.

I’ve been intermittently watching shopgoodwill for a good deal on a tiny projector when one of these popped up. I snagged it for about $30 shipped, and I’m pretty happy with it!

Pico Projectors In General are Not Good

Cast your mind back 2009. The iPhone had a 3.5” screen at 480x320. You might still have a flip phone in your pocket. Flat panel monitors were still seen as a fancy upgrade, but even those were still heavy and expensive. HDMI was a pretty new standard - most likely you still connected video things using analog connections. Imagine you’ve got this photo or (pre-youtube) video you want to show your besties. Awww, sorry guys, all I’ve got is my iPhone because tablets don’t exist and I left my 16lb laptop at home.

kablam somebody pulls out this tiny, battery powered projector the same physical size as an iPhone. It magically projects a dim 8x11 image on the wall of your cubicle and, with the lights out, you all squint to view an 11 lumen image of OK Go on treadmills. What a freaking magician this guy is, who from his baggy-pants pocket extracts a device from the future which makes a light image on the wall.

Yes it was dim. Yes the resolution was rough. It didn’t matter. It felt like the future.

That describes the Optoma PK100. This was at a time when nobody even had LED flashlights other than oddball novelty items. The PK100 connected directly to your iPod, PSP, digital camera or Nokia phone (the iPhone, somehow, didn’t make it into the PK100’s marketing literature) using composite video and shone the future upon whatever surface was available.

I wanted one of those so badly. I don’t remember what they sold for on Woot, but it just seemed too much for the oddball connector and 11 lumens. If only there were a brighter model with digital connections…

The Logical Conclusion

Enter the PK301. 50 lumens, (mini) HDMI, MSRP of $400, same footprint as the iPhone, though about twice as thick. I remember when it was announced. This is what the future is going to look like. Sadly(?), pico projetor development stopped shortly after the 301. Optoma did do and a 320 in the same form factor with 100 lumens, but those seem kindof rare. Optoma seems to have pulled out of that market, though they still make regular-sized projectors even now.

I feel like the market for these must have dried up when tablets arrived and phone screens got bigger. Throwing a dim 8x11 sized image on the wall just isn’t that great compared to an iPad screen. The same thing happened to netbooks.

Modern Pico Projectors

Today, Anker and Kodak (of all companies, why Kodak?) seem to dominate the tiny projector market. Anker’s offerings are far superior to most everything else, but they’re much more expensive ($400ish) and a good bit larger than the 301. Still battery powered though.

Kodak’s Luma 150 is closest in size and features to the 301 and runs about $250 on Amazon. Beware the lower models like the Luma 75 - it’s only 35 lumens and 640x360.

There’s a handfull of Amazon alphabet soup LED projectors with similar specs (50 lumens, low resolution), but those are generally physically larger, maybe to help with cooling or to masquerade as a full-sized projector. I’ve seen a bunch of those at the bin store, if that tells you anything.

301 Compared

The 301 is baggy-jeans pocketable and can put a reasonable 32” picture on the wall from seven feet away. The resolution is better than the cheaper Kodak and alphabet soup models and the lumens are about the same. It does lack a full-sized HDMI port, isn’t USB-C chargable, and of course is only available used. There’s no keystone or autofocus, but most of the cheap models don’t include those either. The optics are reasonably sharp, not that you need it to be sharp at 850x480 native, and the focus ring feels nice and smooth. It’s easy to dial it in.

It’s often surprising / dissappointing how technology changes or stays the same. Think of how different the current iPhone is from the OG. The Anker Nebula Capsule 3 sells for the same $400 today as the 301 did in 2012. It’s 200 lumens and full 1920x1080 resolution, a bit larger, does have a full-sized HDMI port. It’s easily 4x the projector of the 301, but it’s 14 years newer. Somehow, with advancements in LED drivers, I imagined we’d be carrying short-throw 1,000 lumen wonder devices in our pocketses by now. Oh yeah, watch the throw distance of whatever projector you’re getting. Some of the cheapies only want to throw a huge screen which overstreches their brightness and resolution.

Bringing the 301 into the future

OK, the power brick is irritating. And the battery is soft. And mini-HDMI isn’t great. Also, the software to convert files into something it can play from a MicroSD hasn’t existed since the Obama administration. Other than those things, this totally slaps, right? ;-)

The power is an easy fix. It uses a standard 5.5x2.5mm barrel jack at 12v 2A. Most any USB-C PD power supply can handle that, including good quality battery banks. A USB-C PD trigger cable from Amazon is $10 or less. Done.

Mini HDMI means a mess of dongles to connect my phone to it. Amazingly, USB-C to Mini-HDMI cables exist on Amazon for $10! Done.

A few full cycles of the battery brought it back to about 45 minutes of life! Plenty for show and tell. New batteries are available for $30 but…that seems a bit silly. You do you. Note the 301 is limited to lower brightness settings on battery. I got 45 minutes at the higher of those low settings, 20 lumens. The lowest setting might be 10 lumens. Not sure.

$20 on Amazon orders really got me to a good place here. Claude brought me the rest of the way with FFMPEG troubleshooting. The following script will crunch your video files into something the 301 can handle. NOTE the 301 predates SDXC cards, so anything over 32GB won’t work at all.

ffmpeg -i .m4v  
-vf “scale=854:480:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=720:480:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2”
-c:v mpeg4 -vtag xvid -q:v 4 -r 25
-c:a libmp3lame -b:a 128k -ar 44100
.avi

For convenience, here’s a static page that does all of the processing in-browser using ffmpeg.wasm.

Conclusion

So there we go! Snag a $30 projector, throw $20 of dongles in the bag and you’ve got something better than the cheapies on Amazon for a good bit cheaper. Not as good as an Anker, but good luck fitting one of those in your pocket. 2009 me would be so pumped and, to be fair, 2026 me is too.