As you might imagine, I get piles of press release emails every day, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some of them actually sound practical, like the new TSA-approved carry-on bags for laptops from Mobile Edge. Others are more esoteric, like Super Talent’s micro-sized 8 GB flash drive.

Still others are genuine surprises, like Kodak’s recent announcement of their Theater HD Player, a wired/wireless network adapter for viewing still photo slide shows and video content on HDTV sets. (The fact that this product exists isn’t a surprise; plenty of CE manufacturers are coming out with them in 2008. The surprise is that Kodak wants to enter this market in the first place!)

But my nomination for the most unusual product announcement of July (and maybe the whole year) came this past Friday from OLens Technology, who has announced (ready for this?) a portable home theater and gaming video projector for $279. You read that right; just two hundred seventy-nine smackeroos.

How bright is it? The OLens XPJ projector uses a 270-watt lamp, but it’s not a short-arc mercury type. The Web site and owner’s manual are very sketchy on details, but the photos that accompany the lamp replacement procedure in the downloadable owner’s manual show what appears to be an old-fashioned slide projector lamp.

The owner’s manual indicates that 300 hours would be a reasonable lifetime before replacement — a dead giveaway. (The XPJ comes with a spare lamp.) In a former life, I used to design and stage multi-slide projector (multi-image) extravaganzas for corporate and entertainment clients, and have replaced enough lamps to know an ENG or ELH tungsten-halogen bulb when I see one!

Not surprisingly, the Web site and owner’s manual are closed-mouthed about image brightness except in the specifications, which call for a "lumen flux" of 300 lumens. (No, I didn’t leave a zero off.) That’s pretty dim, although the manual says you can expect to light up a 50-inch image from six feet away.

As for the imaging device(s), there are no clues as to what’s actually inside that box. If I had to bet, I’d say it’s almost certainly a single TFT LCD panel, and the specified resolution, 640×480 pixels (VGA), would seem to back that up. VGA LCD panels haven’t been used in projectors for nearly a decade now.

Another blast from the past: The minimal connector complement is 100% analog, with composite, S-video, and VGA input jacks. (HDMI and DVI are out of the question!) Internal stereo audio speakers are rated at two watts, and there’s also a companion roll-up screen with adhesive strips for $30 extra. And warranties? The projector is guaranteed for just 90 days.

My first reaction was: Wow, we’ve gone back to 1990, and nView is back in business! My second reaction: Why would anyone want to buy a product like this when for double the money they could get a bright, portable 3LCD product with digital video inputs, higher native resolution, and a lamp that lasts eight times as long?

My third and last reaction: Who found these projectors sitting in a warehouse collecting dust, refurbished them, and is peddling them online through nine different "never heard of ‘em" resellers? The XPJ’s housing looks suspiciously familiar to me, but I can’t put my finger on it.

In fact, this is what Insight Media would classify as a "Low Cost Projector" and it will be profiled in the upcoming report of the same name. Such products are aimed at consumers who don’t know about other projection alternatives. Look for more on this report in a month or so.

Guess you can find a buyer for just about anything these days…