Welcome to a Digital Camera Battery specialist of the Dell Ac Adapter
For those of you who prefer any portability aspect to a projector, a palmtop one would sound delightful, wouldn’t it? We tested the BenQ Joybee 2 recently, and the Dell M110 came just in time to let us compare the two of them. The results are interesting.
Very compact, in a nutshell! On the front is the lamp, obviously, accompanied by vents and a fan that is clearly visible from outside the grille. On the top is the control cluster – power, menu, direction keys and the return key. The focus set dial is towards the front of the panel. The keys, when lit up, have blue backlighting - very clearly visible, even when you may be operating this in a dark with battery such as Dell 02H098 Ac Adapter , Dell 2H098 Ac Adapter , Dell Inspiron 1000 Ac Adapter , Dell Inspiron 1100 Ac Adapter , Dell Inspiron 5100 Ac Adapter , Dell Precision M50 Ac Adapter , Dell Latitude D800 Ac Adapter , Dell Inspiron 6400 Ac Adapter , Dell Latitude D620 Ac Adapter , Dell Precision M60 Ac Adapter , Dell Inspiron 6000 Ac Adapter , Dell Latitude X300 Ac Adapter room. To the right side of this are two notification LEDs that will indicate any potential issue, if at all, with the projector, including overheating. No cover or cap for the lens, which is a bit of an issue. If you remember, even BenQ did not offer any cover for the lens with the Joybee GP2 projector. This needs to be rectified, considering the damage potential of carrying around this device without adequate protection for the most critical part.
If you look at the M110 front on, the left side doesn’t have any hardware keys on it, except a cooling vent. On the right side is a bigger vent, with another cooling fan. You can clearly see that there are a lot of cooling vents, and the M110 needs it badly, as we will explain later in the review. On the back is where all the connectivity options are – power, HDMI, USB, microSD and a tiny speaker.
The finish of the Dell M110 is completely black in colour, but thankfully it isn’t glossy. The enamel finish does the shine-back job of a glossy finish, but isn’t as needy in terms of maintenance. This one will still catch fingerprints though, be sure of that. This is a palmtop projector, and is built that way. The dimensions are perfect for what it is meant to be, and the weight of less than 400 grams means it can be carried around in a jacket pocket. Don’t forget to carry the power adapter, though!
Good build quality throughout. Feels like a premium device, with no rough edges at all. The only issue, if at all, could be the cramped layout of the ports, and we did feel that the power and the USB port are too close to each other, even more so when you are connecting a USB drive to it, that isn’t the world’s slimmest!
We first tested the video quality by connecting the projector to an HDMI source – WD Live. Colour seemed even for the most part, on the standard setting. Take the setting up a notch towards vivid, and while it looks good for a while, the reds tends to become overbearing. Crispness seemed to be fine with HD content – 720p or 1080p. However, there will be a distinct lack of crispness with SD content. Just to make sure, we played back files from multiple containers – AVI and MP4, but content didn’t look very crisp, but there was a clear dollop of artifacts and noise visible at most times. The Dell M110 definitely had deeper blacks than what the BenQ Joybee GP2 offered, and we had pointed that out in the review as well. For the movie buffs, the details including shadows will be a lot richer with the M110.
For the second round of testing, we decided to plug in a USB drive and test the playback quality and capabilities. Straightaway, we had a problem. Unlike the Joybee GP2, the Dell M110 did not detect an NTFS drive. This was a huge disappointment considering the GP2 detected all hard drives we connected it to. We then connected a FAT32 USB drive, and voila, it instantly detected the drive and took exactly 4 seconds to list the files. Immediately, the interface opened up, dividing the files into Movies, Music and Pictures. We were very happy, that things seem to be in place, barring the blip of not reading NTFS drives. First, we selected a standard definition AVI file. The playback was very disappointing – constant stuttering, and everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. A second, third and fourth AVI file later, we seemed to have resigned to the fate. Just to give it another shot, we played back a bunch of MP4 files, and the results were even worse. The video was constantly breaking, like a bad satellite reception in a thunderstorm. Refused to detect any MKV files, so the question of playback doesn’t arise. Compared to the BenQ Joybee GP2, the M110’s shortcomings get magnified a bit. The GP2 detected all drives, and played back all the AVI and MP4 files we threw at it.