3M MPro150 Pocket Projector

The 3M MPro150 Pocket Projector is gold standard product having received a Gold Award for It Technology category of the Edison Best New Products Awards. Aside from the versatility of the pico projection platform the MPro150 distinguishes itself from the competition with its ability to display Microsoft Office (including PowerPoint) and Adobe PDF files in their native format. No time consuming conversion required. Also boosting the devices ability for making on-the-go business presentations to small groups, are 1GB of internal memory and an included 2GB microSD card. The MPro150 is compact, light and frees the user from being limited to the small screen size of a mobile handheld device.

The 3M MPro150 will connect with a wide range of mobile devices including; iPod, iPhone, iTouch, mobile phones, smart phones, camcorders, DV-Cams and digital cameras. Unlike most other pocket size (pico) projectors which are based on Texas Instrument’s DLP Pico projection technology, the 3M MPro is based on 0.37 inch (9.4 mm) LCOS microdisplay chip which has a VGA (640 x 480 pixels) native resolution. The 3M Mpro150 will project files, photos and movies almost anywhere there’s a surface. It can project a diagonal image of 8 to 50 inches (203–1270 mm) at 6.75 to 42 inches (17 to 107cm) from the screen. Because of the comparatively low lumens rating (compared to conventional projectors), the brightness of the largest projected image sizes is such that it needs a fairly low ambient light level. There is no keystone correction so, the SP-H03 must be manually aligned square to the projection surface The manual focus is a wheel mounted next the lens.

The battery life of for the projector is two hours which will probably cover most of the less formal presentations it is designed for. When replacing the battery one is confronted by the small volume taken by the working parts. The LED have a long life of 20,000 hours which should outlast the life of the 3MPro150 projector as a whole. There are twin 0.5W on-board speakers which are only suitable for fairly quiet environments. If it’s a problem you can plug in some headphones or speakers.

Importantly, the 3M Mpro150 pico projector has the wide range of computer, video input, video file format, business software and image file format compatibility as detailed below.

Supported Computer Resolutions (with scaling): VSA, SVGA, XGA, WXGA
Video Input Compatibility (with scaling): NTSC (480i, 480p), PAL (576i, 576p)
File Viewer Compatibility: Adobe PDF 1.2 to 1.4 (pdf), MS PowerPoint 97 to 2007 (ppt, pptx), MS Excel (xls, xlsx), MS Word (doc, docx), Text (txt)
Video File Compatibility: avi, mov, .mp4, g3P2, g3pp
Audio File Compatibility: .mp3, .wma
Image Compatibility: JPEG, BMP

In the Box – 3M MPro150

3M MPro150 Pico Projector
Micro SD Card 2GB
Battery
Wall Charger
Charger Adapters: US, EU, UK, AUS
Computer cable
Composite Video Cable (RCA)
Tripod
Soft Protective Pouch
Quick Start Card

Review Summary – 3MPro Pocket Projector

The 3M MPro150 Pocket Projector is an excellent pocket sized projector product as confirmed by its Edison Best New Products Award. It’s compact, light provides a good size projected image suitable for a small group. A much better solution than passing around a small screen mobile handheld device. The feature that makes it stand out from all but the Samsung SP-H03 is the ability to display Microsoft Office (including PowerPoint) and Adobe PDF files in their native format – no conversion required.