Epson’s PowerLite 835p / EMP-835 Wireless Projector

Had a chance to play with Epson’s new EMP-835 wireless projector a week or so back. This is being sold in the US as the Powerlite 835p. At first glance it seems rather large, but that soon becomes inconsequential when you discover just what this thing can do…

At power up it proceeded to beam a series of vertical lines onto the wall, and then auto-focus. Next up a checker-board effect appeared and it adjusted its keystone setting as well. Then it presented the EasyMP setup. Not so easy for us at first since it was in Japanese (the model we were using was brought over from Japan), but once we had it switched to English it was all much clearer.

In addition to its auto-focus and auto-keystone, it has a feature called ‘wall shot’ that will attempt to compensate for off-white walls as well. Oh, and a neat preview mode where you get a freeze-frame of what is currently on every one of its inputs. From there you can select one to view live. What are these inputs? Three video sources of different types (composite, S-Video and VGA), and perhaps the best feature: wireless input from a computer running their EasyMP NS Connection software.

Biggest surprise of all was that this wireless software supported my PowerBook and displayed the wide screen format perfectly. If the projector is part of your corporate network, and it supports both WPA and Cisco’s CCX (LEAP) security modes as well as the older WEP mode, then it will be automatically discovered. If it is running in ad-hoc mode (which allows anybody to walk up and connect), then on the PowerBook at least I had to join the projector’s ad-hoc network in the normal way before the tool would see the projector. Once connected it worked perfectly, and in theory I can connect to more than one projector too (if I had them).

This has made it onto my shopping list in place of a large screen TV. Not only can I use it for high quality movie and TV viewing, but I can wirelessly connect my laptop to it for some living room surfing in style. Now I just need the house to put it in 🙂

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