Asus P1M review

The Asus P1M is the successor to our Best Buy-winning Asus P1 Pico Projector. Just like the P1, it’s a DLP projector with RGB LED lamps, and it’s housed within a tiny, highly portable black box. Weighing just 1.3kg, it’s perfect for slipping into your bag for transit, although you’ll have to take its power adaptor with you, as it doesn’t have an internal battery. Its LEDs can produce a bright 200 lumens and have the added benefit of 30,000 hours of lamp life, so you shouldn’t have to factor in the extra cost of maintaining a bulb over the projector’s lifetime.

The P1M is best viewed in soft lighting or with no light at all; when viewed under bright light, most colours are a quite dim and washed out. We had no problem reading black-on-white text and white-on-black text, but only charts with primary colours stood out against the glare, and it was almost impossible to make out any dark scenes in our test images and video files.

With the lights off, colours really came alive. Reds were a little orange on its default settings, but blues were particularly deep and vibrant and greens were very punchy. Our high contrast images were much easier to see, with good levels of detail in both the light and dark areas of the image.

There are seven preset modes in total, including Standard, Blackboard, Whiteboard, Dynamic, Game, Scenery and Theatre. We preferred keeping the image settings on Standard, though, as Dynamic increased the contrast far too much, giving everything a greenish light and making skin tones look almost purple. The Game preset was a little warm; Scenery and Theatre were brighter, but cooler overall.

As the P1M is a DLP projector, there’s a slight rainbow effect where flashes of primary colours can be seen in largely black and white scenes and images. However, we didn’t find it particularly distracting, even when quickly scanning our eyes across the image.

The Asus P1M has a few manual image controls for brightness, contrast, keystone and aspect ratio that you can access through its onscreen menu, and you can adjust image focus using its lens ring. There’s no remote, but its flush menu buttons are fairly easy to use with a little practice. The buttons are positioned on the top surface of the projector, but only the power button has an LED backlight, which means they’re a little difficult to see in low light conditions. Annoyingly, the back of the projector wobbled when we pressed the buttons, causing the entire image to bounce up and down.

Slight menu issues aside, the P1M’s native resolution of 1,280×800 looks stunning for a pico projector, and we watched 720p footage with no problems. It has a fairly short range, just 50cm to 3m, but we still managed an 85in diagonal at 7ft. However, you’ll have to extinguish the lights to pick out any detail at that distance. The P1M is great for smaller meeting rooms where the overall image doesn’t have to be particularly large, and its relatively quiet fan doesn’t disrupt the calm in more intimate spaces.

The flip-out stand on the bottom of the projector also gives it a little flexibility when it comes to height adjustment, but when the base of the projected image is roughly in line with the level of the lens, you should be fine with just resting it flat on a table unless it’s particularly low to the ground.

The P1M’s greatest improvement is its support for different sources and formats. The P1M has the VGA and composite inputs of the original P1M, as well as an SD card slot, a mini-USB input and a USB adaptor. You must use the bundled adaptor if you want to attach composite and VGA connections, as it doesn’t have separate VGA and composite inputs. We had no difficulty projecting a presentation from our laptop over VGA, but the adaptor cable is quite short, so we had to position the P1M within a metre of our laptop’s VGA port.

Projecting footage from USB or SD storage is great, as it saves you the effort of carrying a laptop to meetings, or connecting the P1M to a PC. With USB or SD card storage connected and the P1M switched on, you’ll be taken to the P1M’s built-in media player. It displayed PDFs and Microsoft Office files perfectly well, but data transfer from our SD card was slow, sometimes taking up to three seconds to load a single slide, sometimes longer. Thankfully, the P1M played our test videos smoothly, and it supports AVI, XVID, MOV, MP4, H.264, 3GP, and FLV files.

Its single 2W integrated speaker is another improvement. Speakers are still quite rare on pico projectors, so it’s particularly welcome. Its sound quality isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing. It’s too tinny to use when watching films, though, as there’s simply not enough volume or bass to fill a room.

The P1M’s improvements aren’t without fault, but the end result is a highly versatile pico projector with a huge range of connections. It’s a worthy evolution of the P1 family, but it’s too little too late, as the Best Buy-winning Viewsonic PLED-W200 does everything the P1M does for £70 less.