AAXA L1 review

The nice folks at AAXA has sent us one of their new L1 laser pico projectors for review. Just for your information, AAXA is an advertiser here at picoprojector-info, but I'll try to be as objective as possible.

The L1 Pico-Projector is a small laser-driven LCoS pico-projector (800x600, 20 lumens). It is focus-free, which is great (more on this later). It can accept RCA/VGA/S-Video inputs, and can also read files from a USB key (which is very useful). It's got a little bit of internal memory (160Mb) - which only makes sense for documents or presentations. The L1 costs $599, it's an expensive pico!

What's in the box

The L1 comes with RCA and VGA connectors, a charger, a small 'bracket' (which is used to connect it to a tripod) and a 2GB USB flash disk. Oh, and a user-manual, of course. There's also a nice little box you can use to protect the L1 on the go, with a place for the USB drive:

The L1 pico projector

Because the L1 is also a PMP (from the internal memory or a USB disk) there are quite a bit of buttons and ports. On the side it has a USB connector, an external port used for VGA/RCA/S-Video inputs. On the opposite side there's a headphone jack. The L1 also includes a mono 1W speaker. On the top of the projector you'll find the control buttons, and on the front are the lenses, and happily there's no focus wheel - the laser is always in focus! 

Here are some photos comparing the L1 to the 3M Mpro-120 and the Ray Projector. It's shorter and smaller than the Mpro-120, and it's even smaller than the Ray projector (but it's a bit thicker). It feels heavier, even though it's not, maybe because it's smaller...

The L1 in use

The L1 is quite easy to use. When you open it presents you with a menu-system to access videos, documents, photos and music files. There are also settings and video-input entry. It does not 'detect' the input automatically like the MPro-120 or Ray projector, you have to set it manually.

The document viewer worked fine when I tested PDFs, Excel files and Word documents (all converted from OpenOffice, by the way). There are some nice touches, for example you can jump ahead (or reverse) a few seconds in a movie. I didn't find a way to make larger 'jumps' (to a certain minute, for example).

Interestingly there are two buttons market ON/OFF. One is used to activate the projector or turn it off. The other is used to rotate/flip the image. I have no idea why is it marked with ON/OFF! That's very strange. 

The most annoying thing is that every button press results in a 'ping' sound. There's no way to turn that off (you can choose from 3 different sounds, but two of them are horrible). The good news is that the L1 includes a way to update its own software (from the USB disk) - although we do not know whether AAXA plans to release updates. If they do, that's the first feature I'd add - an option to mute the button press sounds. 

Two more important things I noticed:

• When in use, the L1 is rather quiet, but it gets very hot, very quickly!
• Because there's no need to focus, it's a lot of fun to use this projector - you can project on any surface, move it around. It is really portable and impressive.

Here's a short 2 minute clip showing the menu system and how the L1 displays images, documents and a video:

Page 2 of this review