State of the Art: Silver Screen and LEDs Join at Last

And now, finally, projectors.

Projectors are amazing these days — the ones in corporate boardrooms, the ones in home theaters and the ones that fulfill both functions. But most still have a regular old light bulb inside. A very, very bright one that gets very, very hot and costs very, very much to replace — maybe $300 or $400. And that’s after about 2,000 hours of use.

If you could replace that hot, expensive bulb with LED lights, you’d use half as much power, so you’d be polluting less. Because it would need less cooling, your projector could be much smaller and lighter.

Above all, you’d never have to replace the bulb. The LED projectors in this roundup are rated at 20,000 hours or more — at least 10 times the life of a regular bulb. That’s long enough for you to watch a different movie every night for 27 years, or the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy twice.

I tried out seven LED projectors priced at $1,000 or less. Each comes with carrying case and remote control. Each offers every conceivable input — VGA so you can plug in your laptop, HDMI for Blu-ray players and game consoles, USB and memory-card slots (so you can project PowerPoint files and slide shows and movies without even needing a computer). All produce a 1,280-by-800-pixel image. A few, with the purchase of a Wi-Fi adapter, can display videos and slides wirelessly from a phone, tablet or laptop.

These LED projectors tend to fall into two categories, mobile projectors and business projectors.

Mobile projectors are tiny, tiny boxes; the smallest could be mistaken for a brownie. Then again, the power-cord brick is nearly a third the size of the projector.

These models are cheap and plastic. There’s no height adjustment. The speaker inside is usually 2 watts, mono — awful for watching a movie. You’ll want to connect a real speaker.

The image from these mobile models is nothing like the huge, bright, even, crisp picture that a $1,200 traditional projector gives you. But for their size and cost, these projectors display a surprisingly big, bright image. In a dark room, the image is still bright enough when it’s maybe eight feet wide; with the lights on, you’d probably want to go no larger than five feet wide. (Of course, an actual movie screen — as opposed to a wall — works wonders.)

The mobile models manage 300 or 500 lumens, which are the units of projectors’ light output. That seems pretty feeble compared with the 2,000 lumens of traditional projectors, but our eyes perceive brightness logarithmically. Doubling the lumens doesn’t double the brightness. A 500-lumen projector isn’t half as bright as a 1,000-lumen model; it looks brighter.

And that concludes the science lesson. Here’s what stands out among the mobile LED projectors:

DELL M115 ($520) At about four inches square and 13 ounces, this 450-lumen model is the smallest and lightest projector in the roundup. You could cover it up with a hamburger.

And yet this tiny, black plastic Dell is among the best mobile projectors. The picture is bright and the colors are true, especially in the dark. The buttons on the projector light up when you touch them, which is useful, but their labels are dark gray on black, and therefore pretty much impossible to read. The slot accommodates only Micro SD cards, not standard ones. And a remote is $25 extra (booooo!).

But you can transfer one gigabyte of PowerPoint, Word, Excel, PDF, picture, music and movie files into the projector, turning it into a self-contained, ready-to-use presentation device that fits in your pocket.

AAXA SHOWTIME 3D ($450) This 450-lumen projector offers cheap black plastic, inscrutable no-words menu system, no card slot, orangey skin tones and bursts of blotch in fast scene changes. Not impressed.

Arkham City Sequel will be a Silver Age Prequel

Variety has learned that WBIE (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) is set to introduce members of the Justice League of America in the next installment of Rocksteady's Batman series.

The entertainment trade magazine reports that the much-anticipated sequel to Arkham Asylum and Arkham City will, in fact, be a prequel centred on Batman's first meeting with his arch-nemesis The Joker. Stylistically, it will be based on the Silver Age era of DC comics (1956 to c.1970), when Batman first teamed up with other iconic DC heroes, like Superman and The Flash, establishing the Justice League of America.

Variety claims this is part of a conscious effort by Warner Bros. to expose audiences to the Justice League of America, as it ramps up production on a JLA movie. It also reports the game will be released in 2014 at the earliest, with a JLA film mooted for a big screen release sometime in 2015.

The Silver Age JLA typically consisted of 7 heroes: Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, and Wonder Woman. Which heroes would you like to appear in the next Batman game? Let us know in the comments below.

Cloud Leaves Some Tech Giants Seeking a Silver Lining

On June 11, Apple showed its next operating system for iPhones and iPads. It offered maps and speech recognition, plus music and movies on iTunes, all tied via the Internet to Apple’s “cloud” of servers.

A week later, Microsoft, known better for software, demonstrated the Surface tablet, its answer to the iPad. The Surface interacts with both the Web and Microsoft’s cloud, called Windows Azure. And, last Wednesday, Google introduced its newest cloud-connected phone and tablet, as well as a media player called Nexus Q. The player works with the devices, the Internet and the Google cloud.

Remarkably fast, a multibillion-dollar industry is moving away from personal computers made mostly with Microsoft Windows software and Intel semiconductor chips. The combined revenue from these largely so-called Wintel desktops and laptops last year was about $70 billion at Dell and Hewlett-Packard. But these companies played virtually no part in the June shows from Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Asked what part it hoped to play in the cloud-dominated future, Dell declined to comment. An H.P. spokesman said in a statement that his company had computer servers and software in “eight of 10 of the world’s most trafficked sites, four out of five of the world’s largest search engines, the three most popular social media properties in the U.S.” He said nothing about PCs.

The tech future also poses challenges for Intel, which has been diversifying. Its chips are now in Apple computers and a host of other devices. Intel still has a significant place in the market, but often with lower-margin chips, and increased competition. Another chip company, Nvidia, got a shout from Google’s stage.

We are seeing a new business ecosystem with all sorts of mobile and cloud-connected devices. Each is a powerful computer, with connections to a nearly infinite amount of data storage and processing in the cloud.

“We’re entering this era where consumer electronics is the hardware, and the software and the cloud,” said Matt Hershenson, Google’s hardware director. His view increasingly holds for business computing, too.

Coincidentally, Friday was the fifth anniversary of the iPhone’s introduction. Next week, cloud-based software applications for the iPhone from outside developers will have their fourth anniversary. And, already, cloud devices that Google called experimental last year are now almost mainstream.

People now use their iPhones and tablets in their jobs. More than five million businesses write documents and swap spreadsheets in Google’s cloud-based applications. Microsoft, with arguably the most at risk in this transition, has 273 business and finance applications for sale in its cloud store, Azure Marketplace.

In the new ecosystem, many rules are still being worked out. Amazon, with its Kindle tablet and a successful online computing cloud and software store, may yet be a significant player. So may Barnes & Noble, which has a decent tablet and apps in the Nook reader but lacks a big cloud data center.

A few things are already clear. Power now centers on controlling millions of computers tied together in the cloud, with a complementary marketplace where people can find, sell and manage applications. Few physical stores sell software anymore, but sales channels still matter. Even the iPhone did not really take off until it had apps, sold through Apple’s store.

Those apps were written mostly by outside software developers. Developers have been important to the industry for decades. If you keep thousands of them happy with decent software-making tools and a big potential audience, as Microsoft learned, they will build products that make you essential. When the PC came along, these were games like Flight Simulator and productivity software like Lotus; now we have Angry Birds and modifications of Google Apps.

In the Wintel world, new versions of Microsoft Windows came out every few years, with major software projects tied to desktops and laptops. By contrast, in less than five years Apple has announced six versions of its mobile operating system. Google’s operating system for cloud-connected laptops, called Chrome, is updated every six weeks. The June meetings were intended to get developers working on consumer products that would be out by Christmas.

“Urgency has a whole new meaning now; you can’t slip,” said Andy Peterson, a senior software engineer at L4 Mobile, which makes mobile applications for companies like Sony and MTV. He was one of 5,500 developers at Google’s I/O conference last week. “I started at the company last September,” he said, “and I’m on my fourth application.”

Still, he says, the pace and the ability to get a creation into so many hands is exciting.

Dell and H.P. might not be joyful, but should they be glum? With so many devices, the consistent experience may be guided by centrally managed cloud software, but hardware is where the experience lives. That is why Steve Jobs was so long adamant that Apple control both hardware and software, and why even now Apple is picky about which independently produced apps are allowed in its store.

Microsoft apparently showed off the Surface without much notice to longtime hardware partners but could now bring them in to build it. Google’s strongest outside relationship with a hardware maker seems to be with Samsung. Google’s new tablet was made by Asustek of Taiwan.

Google says it is open to working with the incumbents — but these companies have to completely reimagine themselves, centering on using their esoteric knowledge of how business uses technology, rather than how to make a cheaper PC.

“What H.P. and Dell can do is understand the needs of the enterprise,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Chrome at Google. “They can say, ‘Here is our tablet, we have phones, here is how it will work across your company.’ We don’t have a sales force that can do that.”

That may mean giving up on the consumer market, more or less. But it beats being a relic of the old world.