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January 2001|Portable projection has come a long way since the teacher's pet wheeled the dusty-lensed dinosaur with the frayed, fire-hazard cord into eighth-grade social studies on a rickety cart. Today's projectors travel business-class worldwide and have settled with equal comfort into high-powered conference rooms and educational settings alike. And these connectors don't just connect to wall sockets—like all business and institutional media delivery devices these days, they connect to networks and to each other via modern IT systems. But what exactly is a networked projector and how does it fit into the scheme of modern business presentations? And given realistic expectations of what connections may await you at your destination, is it better to travel light or to bring along a light projector? My ideal portable projector or ultra-portable (or whatever you want to call something in a projector that's easy to carry around) is a unit that you don't have to carry at all. That's right, zero extra pounds are all that I want hanging from my abused, aging shoulder. Carrying my laptop and usual sheaf of papers is enough. So how are you supposed to deliver a primo presentation without a projector? Don't worry, like the ancient proverb—where Muhammad had to go to the mountain, because the mountain was too heavy to drag his way—a lot of places already have projectors installed so, when you finally get to that mountain, you're set. I once did four different presentations in a row using the clients' projectors—all I had to do was attach a video cable to my trusty laptop and start talking! When you know a projector is going to be available at your destination, you don't have to carry one with you. And when projectors are as ubiquitous as printers—or when the conference room "install rate" is high enough—you'll never have to carry a projector again (nor will you have to give up or trade off performance to reduce carry weight). At that happy moment, projector manufacturers also won't have to worry about how many weighty features they have to put into projectors either because chances are those projectors aren't going on the road again—they'll stay in the conference rooms and get fat and lazy. One reason I've heard people use to justify carrying a projector—even when they know that a conference room unit may be installed—is trust. Projectors are a lot like politicians: you learn to cope with the one you know. Rather than taking a chance on a conference unit they don't know and can't trust to perform properly during a critical presentation, many choose to bring their own. I, however, have never met a "working" projector in a decent conference room that I couldn't coax a good presentation from, but then maybe I'm just more liberal in my definition of good than most presenters. Networked Projectors
A projector is best found wired-up and ready to go in a conference room. Better still, it is properly configured as part of a network. Properly configured, to my mind, means you should be able to tell (at a minimum) what kind of unit it is, whether it is working or not, and how many hours its lamp has been run so you can calculate the risk of having the lamp blow out during your talk. Most of what I've seen and heard about for even the simplest projector-inclusive networks tells me that "projector status" information can be made available to whoever wants to access that information. This means that before you leave your office to give that big briefing with the CEO, you should be able to log in to the correct site (Internet or intranet) and find out if the conference room you're headed towards contains a projector that works, and if it's one that you know how to use. A networked projector is usually a "smarter" projector than most of those you hook up to directly. However, some network projectors simply connect to a computer equipped with special software (like InFocus' LightPort), which is in turn a part of a network that is accessible either across the office or around the world. "Smart projector" can mean many things, from a projector that can send out an email (like the latest batch of smart printers and other office appliances) when it needs attention, to a projector that contains an embedded pro- cessor running relatively conventional software. I've seen many versions of the smart projector over the years, starting with units that were more or less conventional PCs (complete with full-sized keyboards) with some kind of projector permanently attached. This kind of system also sometimes appears as the big projector (or other display device) with a PC permanently built into it—you attach a keyboard and log in just as you would with any other PC. Either of these configurations can do essentially whatever you can do with the PC, but they have the limitation of being specialized systems that aren't easily upgraded. The typical "dumb" conference room projector has an RS232 or equivalent connector through which you can access or control projector status. These kinds of connections can be easily migrated (with a small bit of intelligence implanted) to an Ethernet connection using standard protocols where the same kind of status information can be easily accessible over the intranet or Web. Given some more on-board horsepower and memory, you should be able to send your presentation to the projector hanging from your Ethernet network just like you can send your report to the printer to be printed out. But where's the advantage in that? You can already directly attach to a projector and "print out" your presentation any time you want to. The real benefit of a "networked" projector should be that many people—all of those who can access the network—can use that same projector attached to the network like they can use any printer attached to a network.
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