Projector Review: Samsung SP-H03

The average notebook: slim, sleek, and made for travel. The average projector: none of the above. With airlines cracking down on the one-carry-on rule, traveling presentation-givers are less likely to lug along anything that needs its own bulky carrying case. Hence the booming interest in pico projectors -- palm-size PowerPoint presenters that fit into a briefcase alongside a laptop.

Candidates range from Optoma's pioneering pico line to the HP Notebook Projection Companion we reviewed in March. Now Samsung has stepped up with one of the smallest and slickest projectors yet -- and one of the most affordable at $300.

You'll have no trouble finding space for the Samsung SP-H03 in your briefcase, or your coat pocket: Put a chain on the thing and it's practically a key fob, a petite 2.7 by 2.7 by 1.5 inches including its snap-on base battery. The gadget weighs all of 6 ounces.

Samsung provides a zippered carrying case for the projector itself, but you'll also need to tote its AC adapter and a few cables. Notably, a VGA cable to plug in your notebook is not included; Samsung supplies only the adapter or dongle that turns one of the mini-connectors at the device's rear into a VGA port, along with a similar adapter for a composite AV jack for camcorders and one that lets you connect a USB flash drive.

You navigate the SP-H03's control menus by pressing illuminated compass buttons, along with menu, Enter, and go-back buttons, on the unit's top. Connect your computer, switch the projector on, and select either the PC (VGA) or AV input, and you're ready for the show. A screw hole in the bottom of the battery lets you affix a tripod, or you can just carry an airport paperback to elevate the unit above the table.

Bright Enough To Shine

Given a dark room, the Samsung works wonderfully as a PC projector. Colors are bright and text is sharp -- well, as sharp as its 854 by 480 resolution allows -- and a DVD movie played smoothly. At a distance of four feet from a wall, the SP-H03's image measured about three feet diagonally; Samsung says it peaks at about 80 inches (with the projector about 10 feet from wall or screen), though we found it fuzzy at distances over seven or eight feet.

Instead of a focus ring, there's a sliding switch on the unit's side; it worked, though it's so small it can be tricky to make the most minute adjustments. You won't find fancy controls like white balance and keystone adjustments, but there are several test-pattern and solid-color screens available to help fine-tune your image.

Samsung rates the projector's LED light source, whose advertised lifetime is 30,000 hours, at 30 lumens of brightness. That compares favorably to the 10 to 20 lumens of some of the puniest pico projectors, but it's still not enough for easy viewing in brightly lit environments; when we tried the SP-H03 in a sunny room we had to stay within two or three feet of the wall to see a small but acceptable image.

Samsung rates the SP's battery pack at a maximum of two hours. We regularly saw an hour and a half or an hour and 40 minutes before the projector shut itself off, although one time the low-battery warning appeared on screen after only 40 minutes.

Leave the Laptop at Home?

For the ultimate in portability, you can carry just the Samsung and skip your notebook -- the SP-H03 is not only a projector but a player (Samsung calls it a "personal media device"), able to show documents, videos, and photos and play music with no computer attached.

You'll need a mini-USB to USB cable (like the one that probably came with your digital camera) to connect the pico to your PC and drag and drop files into its 1GB (729MB free) of internal storage. Alternatively, you can insert a microSD card (not included) or connect a USB flash drive, though when we did the last with the Samsung running on battery power we got a "USB Power Overload" message. Connecting the thumb drive with the projector on AC power worked fine.

The SP-H03 can read and project Microsoft PowerPoint (both .ppt and .pptx) files and, less usefully, Word, Excel and PDF files; video files including AVI, MPG, MP4 and WMV formats; JPG, PNG, BMP and GIF images; and MP3, WAV, WMA and other music files.

You'll want to check or rehearse your act before putting it in front of an audience -- the device balked at a couple of AVI files we'd downloaded from the Web, and PowerPoint colors and bullets look different from the way they do when you're showing a presentation from a PC. Nor do PowerPoint animations work; instead, you advance manually through slides by pressing the compass buttons. We were mildly annoyed that the file viewer's status bar appears superimposed on each slide for a few seconds instead of progressing invisibly from one slide to the next.

But PC-free presentations work fairly well. Slideshows of images work very well, though there's no background music -- playing MP3s is a separate function. The Samsung's 1-watt speaker is loud enough to fill a small conference room -- easily loud enough to drown out its tiny, quiet cooling fan -- but its sound quality is predictably tinny and poor.

We consider the PC-free functionality a bonus. The SP-H03's primary role is as a PC projector, and a good one. Its biggest drawback? Almost everyone who sees it exclaims, "Wow! Look at that! It's so tiny! So cute!" It's a sure-fire way to upstage your own presentation.