A Pico projector is also known as a handheld projector which is designed to allow the user to share pictures or videos with a large group of people at the same time. It is an emerging technology whose power source is AC or battery or a combination. It is a handheld projector that can be used in conjunction with mobile phones, laptops, cameras, video cameras etc.

The Pico projector currently comes in four different operating technologies.

a)    DLP - Digital light processing: the source of illumination is LED or laser. This technology provides a richer colour palette. It uses mirrors to determine the amount of light to be projected for each pixel in the picture.

b)    LCoS - Liquid crystal on silicon: this technology uses liquid crystals to determine the amount of light required for each pixel. It produces high resolution pictures.

c)    Laserbeam steering: it is compact and produces vibrant images and is often self-focusing

d)    Holographic laser projection: it has numerous advantages when compared to the above three technologies in terms of efficiency and image resolution, but is still formative and relatively expensive.

Pico projector types:

There are five types of Pico projector:

a)    USB Pico projector: needs a display source such as a laptop along with a USB cable and it may or may not have its own a power source. It is small and light-weight.

b)    Embedded Pico projector: this is embedded in devices such as mobile phones and cameras.

c)    Media-player Pico projector:  comes with a memory slot or on-board memory and projects images directly from the memory. The disadvantage is that it has limited file formats, although later models are rapidly improving.

d)    Stand-alone Pico projector: you need a cable such as VGA or HDMI connected to an independent device, like laptop or DVD player to view the images.

e)    Laser Pico projector: it is the latest flavour which uses a laser beam as its source of illumination. It provides the option of enlarging the images and its main advantage is its self-focusing aspect and richer colour palette.