 Welcome to my unboxing of Asus' first projector in the North American market. Now they've been doing projectors for a while, but this is, you guessed it, their first in the North American market, which means this is my first look at an Asus projector. So this is the P1. It is a portable LED DLP pocket projector, which basically means it's got low power consumption, it's got a good small form factor for traveling, business presentations in particular are one of the sort of intended uses for this particular product. I'm going to just sort of start opening it up and then we'll get a little bit further into the details that Asus has on the outside of the box, once I've got the accessories unpacked. This particular one is not a retail sample, so that means that it was already opened before I got a chance to open it. So let's have a closer look at the packaging itself to see what Asus figures is special about this guy. So LED means up to 30,000 hours of lifetime. It also means instant on and off, so there's no waiting for cool down times and warm up times. HD resolution, so that's not full HD, but it's 1280 by 800. It's plenty for a PowerPoint or a spreadsheet. Auto keystone correction is going to be handy because I'll show you guys, oh well okay, I'll show you guys after, but it's got instant height adjustment, which means that you, instead of using a little screw on the bottom that you often use to adjust the angle of the projector, it just has a little flip out stand. It is a short throw projector, so at a distance of one meter, so that is about the distance from here to the wall, I can actually project a 40 inch image, so I'm going to show you guys that afterwards as well. Ultra light weight, sure, got it, and I think that pretty much covers everything that we've got on the box itself. 200 lumens, brightness, okay, so that's pretty comfortable for other products in this kind of a product class. Now this is a cool thing as well, check this out. So the included adapter, I don't know if you'll notice or not, but that is the same adapter that gets used on the majority of ASUS notebooks. So you have to make sure that the particular ASUS notebook is capable of providing enough power, so in this case you want to make sure that it's at least a 3.42 amp adapter, but as long as it's capable of providing enough power, the actual plug will be compatible, so that's pretty cool, right? We've also got a VGA2, appears to be, really, is that an iPhone adapter? Only one way to find out for sure. No, hold on a minute guys. Oh, I hardcore failed there guys. This is an input on the projector, and then these are inputs, you've got composite as well as VGA input to the projector with this particular cable. So the other things we see included here are your quick start guide as well as your disk, whatever you could possibly need that for, as well as a carrying case also included in the package. So there you go, it's got your zipper on one side, throw the projector in there, it's got your zipper on the other side to throw your cables and what not in there, so that's pretty cool. Now let's have a look at the projector unit itself. So it's very, very small, about the same dimensions as a CD disk case, so that means, here, let's go ahead and I'll throw it in the case so you guys can see what it's going to look like once it goes in there. So it's this big, and then if you're not carrying around any accessories, like maybe you have your laptop and you're traveling, you've got your laptop power adapter, you make sure your laptop's charged before the meeting, you can just carry the one power adapter, plug that into the projector once you get all set up, and then run the laptop off battery, so you won't even have to carry around anything extra, you can just fold up the excess and it'll be about yay big. Very, very nice. It actually uses a magnesium alloy case, which means that without any fans at all it would appear...that's cool. Oh, no wait, we got one. We got one, but it should operate fairly cool and fairly quiet, especially because it is using an LED light, which means that there's less heat output from that source, as well as the fact that it has a heat conductive casing. So let's look at the physical aspects of it for a little bit here. So we've got our focus, we've got our navigation buttons on here. You know what, I actually have a cheat sheet for all of this, so yeah, there's your function keys. Let's see what they all do. Menu, source, and power button, that's all there, and then we've got on the bottom view, you can see this is a sample, not for sale. We have a tripod socket as well as the supporting stand, which I'll show you in a minute. From the front we've got the projection lens. No lens cover, that's kind of an interesting thing. I wonder if the retail unit comes with a lens cover, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea, I'll throw that back to Asus. Although if you're keeping it in the case, which you probably should, it's got a nice soft velvety sort of internal, so as long as nobody walks up to your projector while you're using it and goes like that with a quarter or whatever, then you should be in pretty good shape. And then from the back you've got your Kensington lock as well as your power adapter. On this side we've also got our input, so that was for VGA and Composite, so I can show you guys how that works. You can see it's labeled with this side up, there we go. And aside from the fairly limited inputs, I'd say this is more of a convenience product than anything else. So no, you're not going to be gaming on it, you're not going to be watching HD movies in a home theater, this is a very more travel friendly, practical type of product. So you go ahead, you flip out the stand like that, because a lot of the time when you aim the projector right on the table you end up with an image that's cut off by the table itself or too low to really be useful to anybody. So you go ahead, you flip out the stand, you put it up like that, and then one meter away from the wall you should be able to project a 40 inch image. So we're going to try that in a minute. And oh yeah, it has auto keystone, which means that it'll just adjust using a sensor in the projector unit itself for how much of an angle it's at and make sure that it is projecting a flat image up the wall. So that's pretty cool. Give me a sec here guys, we're going to show you the short throw lens that's going on here. So here we are testing out Asus' claim that a mere one meter away from the wall, that's three feet for you Yanks, one meter away from the wall, which is what we are, we can achieve a 40 inch, that is however many centimeters that is, because even here in Canada we do TVs in inches, a 40 inch diagonal image, we have 41 inches, so we have met or beaten the specification. However, as you, are you kidding me? No, I'm not paying attention to you right now. So sorry, a little flustered now. So as you can see, the image is quite washed out, although if you take a look at the lights that we have pointing at it, that is fairly obvious why that would be. So let's try killing one of the lights here. You can see now we end up with a fairly usable image. So even in a fairly lit presentation room, we should be able to bring up some kind of document and, okay, apparently Firefox is not real happy. Sorry, my netbook's pretty slow, so it takes a while to load things. This is like a first generation netbook. I only really use it when I go somewhere where I can't bring a real computer. So google.ca, so you can see what sort of text is going on, bilingual keyboard, ah, whatever, the price was right at the time, this was as cheap as a computer got. So there we go, so in a fairly lit environment, this is what we can expect. So even at our 40 inch size, it looks pretty darn good. However, if you're able to dim the lights, it looks significantly better. And supposing you were using the P1 in a scenario where you actually can eliminate the lights, all of a sudden you end up with a pretty darn bright image considering the form factor of this projector and the fact that even though we're not in eco mode, so you're not going to get the 30,000 hours of battery life, you'll still get like well over 10,000 hours of battery life, so that's very very impressive for the kind of brightness we're getting out of it. In fact, I mean moving further away from the wall, I'd say with reasonable usability, you can get a pretty darn huge image out of this thing. It starts to lose a little bit of the color here. You can also see the auto keystone working as I tilt it up and down, you see that? See it making the adjustments? So that's just me angling the projector more or less and see how it retains somewhat straight edges no matter what I do to it. So I'm just going to go ahead and turn the lights back on for a minute here. And I think that pretty much wraps it up. I mean there's the, actually there's a couple of menu options that are somewhat interesting. So if you go in here, the menu is actually very easy to navigate. You've just got your navigation buttons and then your enter button, so we'll go ahead and check out some of the splendid video options. So you've got standard, blackboard, whiteboard, dynamic mode, dynamic mode doesn't seem to be that great, but game mode looks pretty sharp. Scenery mode, theater mode. I wouldn't mind if they had a yellow wall mode because a lot of presentations are done on walls that are not 100% white, so that would have been pretty nice to see included. You can also adjust things like the image setting, there you go, so you can, oh, no, that's not the right one, where is it? It's in setup maybe. Yeah, setup, so you can set the, aha, the lamp power, so high or low. There you go, so that's the difference between high and low. Actually I should let you see that with the lights more off here. So high, whoop. And that's the cats getting into something. So low and high, looks just like that. And I think that pretty much wraps it up here guys. Press the power button again to turn it off. Look at that, instant off. Oh and hey, if I wanted to turn it on again, I never showed you guys the instant on functionality. It turns on pretty much instantly. It takes about, I think, Asus' spec is five seconds to warm up, so there you go. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the P1 portable LED projector from Asus. Don't forget to subscribe to Lion's Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and nothing