The IT Nerd

If you’re in a business that requires you to make presentations on a regular basis, you are often at the mercy of whatever audio/visual setup your client or potential client has. So you might make the decision to carry your own projector. If that’s you, then you should take a look at the Asus S1 Mobile Projector which has a number of things going for it.

First of all it is tiny. Here’s a picture of it next to my MacBook Pro:

As you can see, the Asus S1 going to be easy to carry in your laptop bag as it will not take up a lot of space. It doesn’t weigh a lot either. With the power adapter, it weights 1 pound. But you might be able to leave the power adapter at home as it has a battery. The battery can project for up to 3 hours, and can also charge a mobile device that has a USB micro-B port. It also comes with a carrying case that holds the projector, but strangely not the power adapter. In terms of connectivity, the Asus S1 has an HDMI port, which doubles as Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) for use with compatible Android devices. It also has the USB Type B port that I mentioned earlier and an audio-out jack. What’s nice is that you get a HDMI cable, an HDMI-to-USB micro-B cable for MHL connectivity, and a USB Type B-to-USB micro-B cable in the box. One thing that I missed having was a old school VGA port. One person also commented that it could use a DisplayPort as well. The flipside to not having those ports is that it keeps the projector small.

The Asus S1 is a Texas Instruments DLP based projector and is rated at 200 lumens of brightness. It has native WXGA (854-by-480) resolution, which is very nearly a 16:9 aspect ratio. Its LED light source is rated to last for up to 30,000 hours. In short you’ll never have to change it. How well does this work? I was able to get an image that I measured at 55″ diagonally from 5.5′ away. It was good but it didn’t blow me away as I think that’s the limit of what the projector could do. I got to within 5′ and the image quality was much better. Text in particular was much better. I would use this projector in a small room that is as dark as possible. There’s also a speaker built into the projector. It’s a small speaker that you might have difficulty hearing in a larger room. Another reason why this projector is best suited for a small room.

My verdict? The Asus S1 Mobile LED projector is a capable and snazzy mini projector, with some nice touches like MHL connectivity, an internal battery, and the ability to charge other devices. It has a very appealing price tag of less than $400. It’s best suited for smaller rooms, but it works well enough that you’ll want to put this in your laptop bag.

This entry was posted on July 5, 2014 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Products with tags Asus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.