Asus P1M review

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.