GE PJ1 Camera + Projector

A year after Nikon first attempted it, General Electric has unveiled its own compact digital camera with a built-in projector, the PJ1.  It's no great shakes in photographic terms, but it can beam your pictures onto the wall.

The first camera to have its own pico-projector, the Nikon S1000pj, had to be an unusual shape, but Nikon fortunately smoothed things out on the later S1100pj.  If you were nostalgic for the lop-sided black box that made up the first version, though, General Electric has some good news for you: the GE PJ1 bears a remarkable resemblance to Nikon's 2009 offering.

There are, however, some technical differences between the two cameras.  The PJ1 has a 14 Megapixel sensor and a 28-196 mm lens with a limited range of apertures (f/3.9-5.8), and the projector is different too.  GE's gets up to 15 lumens, but has a maximum resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, compard to 640 x 480 pixels on the two Nikon models we mentioned above.  It also uses DLP, rather than the LCoS technology normally preferred for projectors of this size.  Finally, the contrast ratio doesn't ever get higher than 300:1.

With 720p video and a 3'' screen whose resolution only stretches to 230 000 pixels, the PJ1 is, in other respects, in step with the rest of the market.

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