A little while back, when the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj compact camera was announced, we discussed it on the PC Pro podcast. This, it must be said, was the day after the announcement of its existence and so we hadn’t seen one. But the big news was this camera, rather bizarrely we thought, had a projector in it.

The general consensus at the time was that it was probably, maybe, possibly a good idea in the long run, but a gimmick as it stood. We reckoned it was your typical early-adopter-only product.

Well, I’m eating our collective words now that I’ve spent the weekend playing with one.

Now I’m not one to be lured by gadgets for gadgets’ sake – in fact I hate them. But I like this one. I like it a lot. And I like it for four reasons:

1. It works.

It may be a first-generation design, but it does exactly what it says. And the projector stuffed into its innards doesn’t massively affect normal picture-taking abilities aside from making it a bit chunkier than your average modern compact. In fact, most of the time you can forget that it has a projector in it at all.

2. The first time you see your photos magically appear on the nearest wall, you’ll giggle.

And the second time, and the third. It’s just great, and absolutely everyone I’ve showed it to makes the same child-like, gurgly happy noises and immediately wants to play.

3. It’s an idea with a future.

As left-field as the whole concept initially sounds, as soon as the giggle-effect has subsided you start thinking about other things to do with it. The first one that sprang to my mind was using the camera as a movie projector. And lo! As with any compact these days you can shoot movies on the S1000pj, but you can then immediately project them, which induces even more silly giggly fun. Disappointingly, it doesn’t have a video input so you can’t feed, say, a standalone camcorder or netbook into it. But it probably wouldn’t take much to add that input to the next model.

4. The integration and pricing make it a disruptive technology.

How many people do you know who might go out and pay £400 for a dedicated pocket projector? I’d hazard a guess that would be none. How many people do you know who might go out and pay £400 for a new camera? Probably at least a few. With the S1000pj you’re not paying several hundred quid for a niche gizmo with no obvious purpose, you’re paying it for the latest Nikon camera. You carry it around with you because it’s a camera. Everyone wants a camera: it’s not an expensive solution looking for a problem, unlike a dedicated pocket video projector. The projector adds roughly £150 to the price – there’s a fair minority who’ll pay that for a cool feature in their new toy, even if they think they probably won’t use it all that often. Hence, Nikon is likely to shift more pocket projectors into the market than the pocket-projector manufacturers themselves.

The downsides

So the light output is only 10 lumens – compared to several thousand for a standard desktop projector, or 50 for the likes of the recent generation of pico-projectors like the Dell M109S. But that 10 lumens is brighter than it sounds*. In a worst-case test scenario, projecting onto a whiteboard right next to the windows in the PC Pro office, we managed to project an image with about a 10in diagonal; move the camera any further back than that and it gets too dim to be useful. Put it in a darkened room, though, and you’ll manage an image size of a couple of feet no problem at all. It looks great.

Battery life is a bit of an issue, but again less than you might initially think. It’ll last a maximum of an hour in projector mode, and that’s assuming the battery’s fully charged, which a camera kept in your pocket usually isn’t. But you’ll rarely want to use the projector for more than twenty minutes at a stretch unless you’ve a particular yearning to revisit the 1970s and bore your audience into an early grave with your holiday slideshow.

So let’s say in five years’ time battery life has increased two-fold and the efficiency of LEDs has done the same, which I’d say is a reasonable expectation. That gives you a four-fold increase in brightness, or a four-fold increase in battery life for the same brightness. And four hours of projection time is perfect for films.

Futurology is a mug’s game, but I’d go so far as to say there’s an even chance of integrated projectors becoming a standard tick-list feature on compact cameras. And once they make their way into lots of cameras, the prices come down and people start wanting them, they’ll pop up in laptops and netbooks too. And all thanks to the off-the-wall punt that Nikon is taking with the S1000pj.

Plenty of things might derail that prediction of course, not least the fact that your average branch of Jessops doesn’t have too many darkened rooms, making the projector a tricky thing to demonstrate. But the S1000pj is the first true hardware innovation I’ve seen in a long time that really looks like it has legs.

UPDATE:

So here’s an image I put together that best represents how things look in a darkened room. In fact in this case a more or less totally dark living room at about 10 o’clock last night. This picture is two exposures blended together so that you can see both camera and projected image. It’s not a mock-up, it’s the actual image that the camera was projecting in that actual position, I just took a long exposure and  shorter exposure without moving anything and blended them to get the best feel of how it actually looks. For scale, those orange and green things at the bottom of the shot are the cushions at either end of my sofa:

Not too bad, eh? That’s an image of a good four feet diagonal. Again, remember this was more or less total darkness so you’re seeing the best it’ll do, but even so it’s impressive if you ask me.

*Human response to brightness is roughly logarithmic rather than linear, in other words the brighter a light is the less sensitive we are to it. So a 100-lumen projector only appears about twice as bright as a 10-lumen one.