Here's a nice video from the Mobile World Congress show - TI demoing their DLP pico-projector chipsets and gadgets that use it (the Samsung Beam and W9600, LG Expo and NTT DoCoMo dock F-04B).

Engadget has posted a first hands-on with the new Samsung Beam DLP projector phone. They say that it's rather thin, and it can also do a nice trick: the projector can display the image seen by the camera (5mp). Nice. Here's a video:

Update: This projector will be called H03.

Samsung is showing a new pico-projector. It's white and rectangular, has 30 lumens, a VGA connector, a speaker, and it's using a LED as the light source... and that's all we really know.

Via TechRadar

TI has announced their second-generation DLP chip for pico-projectors back in February 2009, and now it's finally ready. The new chip is smaller than before, and supports WVGA resolution (854x480).

DLP chips, Gen1 and Gen2

TI has issued a press releasing listing a lot of new devices that use the new chip. There's an upcoming Samsung projector (called SP-H03) and one from ForYou, too. Hopefully we'll get more details on these two soon. Here's the complete list of DLP Gen-2 products listed in TI's release:

• NTT DoCoMo pico-projector phone dock F-04B
• Samsung W9600 projector phone
• Asia Optical digital camera protoype
• Optoma PK201 and PK301
• Samsung SP-H03 projector
• Foryou Media projector

AAXA has released new connectors that allow a direct connection from Nokia (N-series), HTC and Samsung phones to the P1 and P2 pico projectors.

Here's the full list of supported phones. AAXA's P2 is LCoS based, has 33 lumens, 800x600 resolution and can project images up to 80". It's available now for 340$.

I had an interesting discussion with Karl Guttag from Syndiant, about the difference types pico-projectors, I thought it was a good idea to turn it into a post (thanks Karl!).

There are three main types of pico-projectors:

• Stand-alone: These are devices that are essentially just a projector. They receive the input via a cable (A/V, USB, etc) and cannot display anything unless you use another device to stream the video signal. Sometimes these include speakers, too. Examples include the 3M MPro-120, Optoma's PK-100 and PK-101 and Microvision's upcoming laser-based Show WX.
• Media-player: These projectors also include on-board memory (or a memory-card slot) and can play files directly from the memory. Obviously the projector needs to support the file type you want to view, whether it is photos, videos or audio files. Examples include the AAXA P2 and the Optoma PK-102. Some of these projectors actually include a mini PC. The Allcam CP1 actually runs Win-CE, and thus can show Office documents, includes a touchpad controller and can be hooked to external mouse and keyboard. It's a bit bigger and heavier than the average pico-projector, though.
• Embedded projector: in this case the light-engine is added to an existing product (projector-phone, camera, laptop, PDA, etc.) as an accessory. Examples include the Samsung Show phone and Nikon's Coolpix s1000pj camera.

Samsung has launched the MBP200 pico-projector in Germany, and it will cost around 500$ (375 euro, in Amazon.de) - as opposed to 300$ when it was launched in Korea a couple of months ago.

The MBP200 can also be bought in Amazon.com, and shipped in the US through Korea, for 540$.

Samsung MBP200

The MBP200 includes a microSD slot, a small 2.2" QVGA LCD (320x240), and weights only 140g.  It's a 480x320 (HVGA), up to 50" DLP based projector.