The good news is that both these camps will be fairly happy with the results of the Maxon projector. It’s extremely lightweight – even when you combine the tripod and the power cable into the total weight figure, you can still barely notice it in your bag. And even though it uses proprietary ports, it comes with a VGA cable and a composite cable connector which means you can plug in pretty much any video source you’ve got, from your PC to your iPod.

The inbuilt speaker doesn’t pack a lot of punch, but that’s why Maxon sell speakers on their website – you can plug in any powered speakers using a standard 3.5mm headphone cable.

In a dark room, you can easily get the screen size up to about 50 inches, although that does require the Visimax to be over 2 metres away from your screen. And when you do get that far away, the 15 lumens struggles a bit. In fact, in bright sunlight you’re going to struggle to really see anything, so think about that before making a purchase.

The battery lasted about 35 minutes before it needed rejuicing, and the included tripod feels well made and looks pretty good too.

Even from reading the specs, we knew that this would never be the ideal home theatre device, and it’s not. The colours appeared fairly washed out and the picture a bit grainy if you made the screen too large. But those weaknesses can be forgiven given the projector’s size and light weight. If you’re after a portable screen larger than your laptop, then this has your name written all over it.

[Maxon Visimax projector]

But their most recent product – the Visimax portable projector – is the start for bigger and better things for the company. The projector itself is tiny – it happily fits into the palm of your hand (it measures in at 27 x 58 x 60mm) and weighs just 120 grams. Yet it can throw a picture up to 60 inches in size without blinking its little LED powered eye.

It has a VGA resolution, 15 lumens worth of brightness, a contrast ratio of 200:1 and a manual focus dial. There’s a mono speaker on board, but you can output stereo sound via the headphone port or the composite video cable that comes in the box.
Also in the box is a tripod and a lower vertical stand, a D-Sub 15 pin cable for the business folk who want to use this as a work tool (as opposed to watching movies from their iPod on a bigger screen), composite cables, a power adaptor and a carry case. You get 30 minutes worth of power from the included battery too.

We’ve got a unit here that we’ll be playing with over the next week or so, but if you can’t wait for our review and must own one for yourself right now, you can pick them up for $594 on Maxon’s website.

[Maxon]