So you need to show off your latest holiday snaps or home movie to your friends and family, and don’t have a digital photo frame, tablet computer or laptop anywhere nearby.
What you need is a camera that can throw images onto a nearby wall. Happily, Nikon has announced that it has upgraded its projector-wielding Coolpix compact. There are more megapixels, high definition movie capabilities and an even brighter projector, as well as a body redesign and new color options.
Last year Nikon introduced the world’s first compact camera to feature a built-in projector, the S1000pj. As well as the front-facing projector, it also packed a 12.1 megapixel CCD sensor, a 5x optical zoom lens, a 2.7 inch LCD display and SD/SDHC support. Now Nikon has revealed its successor, the appropriately named Coolpix S1100pj.
It’s obvious just by looking at the new camera that things have changed quite a lot. It now sports a curvy new design and comes in a couple of extra color choices – as well as black and silver, users are also offered violet and green. The technology has been given a spruce-up too, the S1100pj now benefiting from a projector unit that is 40 percent brighter than its predecessor, at 14 lumens. Projected images benefit from a full 16 million color palette and can range from 5 to 47 inches (13 to 120cm) diagonally across from a throw distance of 10 inches to over 7 feet away (26 to 240cm). There’s a 30:1 contrast ratio and a built-in touch interface.
The camera’s CCD sensor is now 14.1 megapixels but the lens remains the same 5x optical NIKKOR wide-angle zoom as before. Image stabilization is a combined lens shift and electronic effort in still image mode, with lens-shift making a solo performance in movie mode. The camera now records up to 720p high definition and the touchscreen LCD display is now 3 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 460,000 dots. The ISO sensitivity remains the same as the S1000pj at ISO80 to ISO6400, but memory card support has been extended to include SDXC.