Philips PicoPix 1430

Philips bills its PicoPix 1430 as the perfect LED projector for ordinary consumers, stressing the importance of the built-in media player.  The Dutch manufacturer wants its customers to store content on the 2 GB of built-in memory, or else from an SD, SDHC or SDXC memory card (although this last format isn't actually mentioned in the official documentation) and then take it with them when they visit friends and family.

Hardware and handling: impressive media player

The PicoPix is relatively large for a product in its category, measuring 10 x 10 x 3.2 cm and weighing in at 290 g.  The Optoma PK301, for example, weights just 250 g.



The PicoPix 1430 has a pair of 2 x 0.3 W stereo speakers.  That's not a typo, they really do just offer 0.3 W each and so it's no surprise that the quality is far from amazing.  The sound is tinny and could do with being much louder.  Things hardly get better when you spin it around to look at the back, where you'll find a VGA input and a mini USB port.  If you want to use composite video cables, you'll find an adaptor is included, but for component video you'll need to buy an extra adaptor.  We were disappointed not to find a HDMI port like on the Optoma PK301.

What did impress us, though, was the media player.  We were only expecting it to be able to decode a handful of formats, but nothing could be further from the truth.  The only things it struggled with were MTS, M2TS, ISO and WMV files, but it did a perfect job with AVI, MP4, MKV and MOV with a whole range of codecs.  The only hitch is that if there are several audio or subtitle tracks in a file, the projector will automatically select the first without leaving users the choice.

The noise level of 27 dB is relatively low, but the whistling sound made by the fan is rather high-pitched and so stands out.  Energy consumption is as low as 7.5 W in 'eco' mode, rising to 11 W once the settings are tweaked to our liking.  That's enough to give you around 1 hour 45 minutes of battery life, which means you should be able to cram in a short film.  There's no chance you're going to get through The Lord of the Rings without bringing the charger though ...

Image quality

We tried each one of the different modes and 'standard' mode turns out to be the best compromise with a brighter picture than the others.


In general, the quality of the picture changes according to the size of the image you're projecting.  When you're three metres back from the wall, you get a 1.5 m image which is rather washed-out.  The colours are pale and the contrast ratio only reached 134:1 on a test card with 1% white.  If you want to have any chance of enjoying the film, you'll have to turn off the lights.  But if you're prepared to bring the projector closer to the screen (and thus have a smaller image), then things look brighter, though it's still not quite good enough to watch a film in a sunny room.

The next problem is a very noticeable example of the rainbow effect, that not even LEDs can get rid of.  If you're susceptible to spotting this optical illusion, then you'll definitely notice it here.

Picoprojectors have never been great at producing a particularly sharp picture and the PicoPix 1430 is no exception.  Despite our best efforts to improve the focus, things remained a little blurry.  Upscaling is obviously not much good either.