Presenting Smaller, Lighter Projectors

he days of sore arms and backaches from lugging heavy projectors between airports and conference rooms may be gone. A new technology has enabled manufacturers to reduce the size and weight of their projectors.

Called digital light processing (DLP), the technology developed by Texas Instruments is likely to replace the liquid crystal display (LCD) eventually. LCD projectors have three mirrors that separately project reds, blues and greens. The three streams combine on the projection surface.

DLP technology creates a complete image before it is projected onto a single mirror and then out of the projector. Manufacturers of DLP projectors have taken advantage of the single mirror requirement to make projectors that are just a bit larger than a notebook computer and can weigh less than 5 pounds.

"These DLP ultraportables can handle video and data with ease," says Stuart Schaffer, vice president of marketing for Proxima Corp., a San Diego, Calif., projector maker. Plus, hooking portable projectors up to notebooks is not as complex as it used to be, Schaffer says.

Proxima's UltraLight series projectors feature DLP, weigh 5 pounds and project bright images even with the lights on. InFocus Systems Inc. of Wilsonville, Ore., and NEC Technologies Inc. also have DLP offerings.

But be warned: DLP projectors have not had time to establish much of a track record, and they are costly. Schaffer suggests that today's improved LCD projectors still are attractive for those doing presentations on the road. And LCD projectors now cost less than they used to because DLP projectors rule the high end.

NEC sells its VT440, an LCD model that weighs almost 9 pounds, for just under $3,000 on the General Services Administration schedule. InFocus' LP330 "Dragonfly" DLP projector has a list price of $2,000 more; it's not yet on a GSA schedule.

While size, weight and price vary greatly from company to company and product to product, image quality should be an important factor when choosing a projector. These days, both DLP and LCD projectors deliver the goods. Presenters just need to consider how sore their arms get when lugging the units around.

Service

Sometimes All Is Not Lost

Computer cataclysms occur more often than technical staffs and users would like to admit, and computers sometimes need life preservers. The Novato, Calif., company DriveSavers Data Recovery Inc. offers agencies whose computers have been charred in fires or ransacked by viruses a chance to snatch their data back from the edge of oblivion.

DriveSavers specializes in analyzing disk media--that is, floppy disks, hard drives, CD- and DVD-ROMs and even redundant array of independent disk (RAID) drives commonly used for mass storage. Whether the components of a drive have failed or a virus has wiped out the disk's file structure, DriveSavers can attempt a recovery. "We have a 90 percent success rate," says Nikki Stange, a data crisis counselor for DriveSavers.

DriveSavers has helped agencies such as the Agriculture Department, Army, Defense Information Systems Agency and NASA. A spokeswoman for
DriveSavers says that while the company does not always succeed in retrieving data, particularly when the actual disks within a drive have been physically damaged, the success rate is good. A company that offers a similar service is Ontrack Data International Inc. Their existence is good news for agencies whose data seem to have vanished.

Hardware

HP Introduces a Palm-Size Jornada

Hewlett-Packard Co. recently released a new Jornada series of handheld computers that feature familiar versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Word, Outlook and Internet Explorer. The small, thin units come with bright, color screens and PC-card slots that can accept various cards such as IBM Corp.'s Microdrive miniature hard drive.

The Jornada series resembles Palm Computing's Palm devices. However, the Jornada doesn't use the Palm operating system. Instead, it runs on Microsoft Corp.'s recently released PocketPC, a redesign of the Windows CE operating system.

The 9-ounce Jornada 540 speeds along using a 133-megahertz processor and has 16 megabytes of memory. Users can click through the touch interface with their finger or a stylus. The Jornada has its own speaker, a removable metal cover and an infrared port for synching calendar and contact information with a user's desktop. HP advertises eight hours of battery life when the 540 is unplugged.