In the 2008 Insight Media Picoprojector report, I said the boundary lines among various handheld devices was fading and forecast it would continue to fade in the future. This has continued to happen, as forecast, I am happy to say.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

Cell phones with cameras: this isn’t news. Cell phone with camera and media player: this isn’t news. Cell phone with camera, media player and integrated picoprojector. This was news earlier in the year when Samsung and Logic Wireless showed systems at CES.

Today’s news along these lines is a camera with a picoprojector built into it, the Coolpix S1000pj announced by Nikon on August 4th. The camera is a good point-and-shoot Nikon digital camera with a 12.1 Mpixel sensor, 5x optical zoom lens and a 2.7" 230,000 dot LCD screen. The camera can take VGA resolution, 30 FPS movies. In addition, the camera has a built-in 10 lumen VGA LCoS projector. According to Nikon, the camera battery is good for an hour of projection. The rumor is this projector, or perhaps the whole camera, was built by Foxlink Image Technology in Taiwan. For details on this camera/projector direct from Nikon, click here. In addition to the normal still photos, the website includes a video demonstration of the camera as well. The camera will have a $430 MSRP when it becomes available in September 2009.

This camera uses a wired USB interface to download pictures. I am waiting for a camera with a wireless interface such as Wi-Fi. I am careful about my USB cable, but I hate to think about how many cables I have bought for my daughter. Besides, a camera like this with Wi-Fi would do much more than download to your laptop: it would be able to post your photos or videos directly to the web or e-mail them to your friends. Then why limit the camera to posting photos? Web browsing is certainly an obvious possibility. The camera has a microphone and a speaker, so you could access Skype as well and use your camera as a cell phone.

In the 2008 Picoprojector report, I defined a handheld device as anything small enough to hold up to your ear and use as a cell phone, even if it didn’t have cell phone capabilities. This Nikon camera/projector at 155g and 143cc certainly qualifies under this rule. A basic cell phone mechanism is cheap, perhaps $3, and consumes so little space and power you can build it into virtually anything, including a digital camera or a picoprojector. Wi-Fi is about the same price and would allow you to go on-line without paying a monthly subscription to the cell phone service provider, much to the disgust of the service providers. Including either technology (or both!) into a camera like this Nikon would increase the utility without dramatically increasing the cost or size. The Coolpix S70 announced at the same time as the S1000pj has an OLED touch screen. Maybe the next generation of Coolpix cameras will have both touch screen and picoprojector integrated in the same unit, with a wireless interface, of course. With the S1000pj, you will need to make do with buttons and a remote control.

I am currently working on the updated 2009 Picoprojector report, which will explore the issues related to integrating picoprojectors into handheld devices in detail. This updated report should be available later this month or in early September.