ASK M5

Proxima's Norwegian-based ASK brand seems to have found a new goal: to produce smaller and lighter portable digital projectors than anyone else. At first, the M5 appears almost too light and insubstantial to be a serious contender. But once you plug it in, it turns out to be one of the best-featured and ultimately the most desirable ultra-portable presentation machines we've seen to date.

Weighing around 2.3kg and occupying a desktop footprint of considerably less than an A4 sheet of paper, the M5 stands on three rubberised feet. The two on either side at the front can be adjusted with a push-button release catch or incremental screw action; in either case, there's no risk of the feet falling out. A single non-adjustable rear foot is located at the middle of the back end. You can't raise the image very far with this setup, but remember this is a projector that really is small enough to stand on a few books if necessary without obscuring the view. Keystone image errors from raising the height of the feet can be adjusted satisfactorily from the on-screen projector menus.

Zoom and focus are adjusted manually with rubberised rings around the lens. These were a little stiff in the review model, making it too easy to nudge the lightweight device from its appointed direction with each lens adjustment.

Most of the connectors are found at the back with the exception of the power input, which is untidily located on one side. The connectors include both a standard D-SUB-style VGA port and one of the new DVI (Digital Visual Interface) ports for hooking up to graphics cards intended for driving digital flat-panel displays. If you have such a card, you'll obtain a crisper image from the M5 through this digital-only port; you can use both video ports simultaneously with two different PCs and switch between them at will. In addition, you can attach standard analog video and S-Video sources.

There's also a USB port for hooking up to your PC so that you can use the remote-control handset to take over Windows mouse actions. This handset, known bizarrely as the BatMouse III, is comfortable to hold and features a helpfully small number of button controls, each clearly labelled. A laser pointer and trackball are built in too, all running off just two AAA batteries. We encountered no problems when controlling the M5's on-screen control menus by pointing the handset at the projected image rather than the unit itself.

The star of the show, however, is the image itself, which is astonishingly bright and clear. At its native XGA resolution, the image is quite perfect, yet we also managed some surprisingly readable (fuzzy not blocky) and stable results at compressed 1,152 « 864 and 1,280 « 1,024 resolutions. You can even switch into 16:9 mode when playing back widescreen DVDs, and you can interactively adjust the white-point colour temperature by rolling the trackball.

Ultimately, the big question is whether you want to spend £4,000 on a digital projector that you may only intend for boardroom use. However, the money buys you not just portability but quality too, from remote control and image controls to the image itself. Forget about lugging around a flightcase: if travelling presentations, group training and small lectures are your business, you won't find an ultra-portable more worthy of the name than the M5.

Author: Alistair Dabbs