Sleek, robust, light and portable, I’m excited to try this neat, all-in-one projector. I love the idea of bluetooth connectivity and a built-in browser, with WiFi, too. Setting up is intuitive, and I only need to glance once at the Quick Start guide.
Although a frozen touchscreen called for a restart, it connected easily to the Mac.  It comes with a cute little tripod which is set up easily.
So far, so good.
Now, though, it all goes a bit wrong.  One of the slides I pick at random contains embedded music. The clarity of the built-in speakers is pretty good, but overall the sound quality is no better than speakers built into my Mac.  So it’s great if you want to travel light (sorry about the pun) but not much use if you need to have your laptop with you anyway…
The connection cable is too short for my liking, too.
When it comes to the visual presentation, the beam angle isn’t bad at all. It projects reasonably large images over short throw distances. But, sadly, there’s just not enough power.
It’s a sunny day and the windows are south facing. I take pity on the machine and draw the blinds.  Still not enough image.
It’s like playing a Robert Plant track with only 3 Watts in your amp.  It simply doesn’t have the impact.
I sit and I think – is there something I’m missing? I go to the website to download the manual, but it’s not available yet. Well, as I’ve got the MP180 before it’s public release, I suppose I can forgive them. Almost.
Killer images demand the best projection
A quick check of the specifications of the MP180 reveals an output of 30 lumens.  My faithful old Acer projector throws out 2500. That means I can project colour images, like this snake, with confidence.  The MP180 barely shows the snake at all in a dim room. And in a room with normal light levels, I couldn’t see anything except the lighter parts of the image – such as parts of the head.
It fared better with non-image-based slides, particularly with white text on a black background, but as my job is to encourage people to move away from dull and ineffective bullet-point slides, that doesn’t help me much.
The MP180 is a cute bit of kit and has value if you’re on the road a lot and your audiences are small.  But if you’re only displaying to a couple of people, it’s probably just as easy to use a tablet computer or laptop.  It’s a great toy and I can see my kids having fun projecting things onto walls for a laugh, but it’s simply not a professional’s piece of kit.
