Name: CASIO XJ-S series
Category: projector
Price: JPY207,900 - JPY312,900
Release date in Japan: Early July, 2008

Modern projectors are thin and light enough to be briefcase-luggable; they'll happily travel with you to meetings. CASIO, which boasts the "world's thinnest" 3.2cm-thin B5 projectors, is improving its lineup with the similarly-svelte but brighter XJ-S series.

Leading the eight new models is the XJ-S57 (JPY312,900), which sports a 2x zoom, auto keystone correction (to keep the screen a nice rectangle when you project at an angle), XGA (1,024×768) resolution that will display sources up to UXGA (1,600×1,200), and (along with the XJ-SC215) the ability to read and display data (MS Office, PDF, JPEG, BMP, AVI, MPEG4, Motion JPEG) directly from a USB drive. At 3000 lumens, it's bright enough to use in a meeting room with all the lights on. A separately-sold USB wireless adapter will let you send data from a PC to the unit via WiFi.

Lower-priced models cut the brightness, down to 2300 lumens in the entry-level, USB-less XJ-S32 (JPY198,000).

All eight models offer an impressively small B5-sized package (27 x 20 x 4.3 cm; 3.2 cm at the thinnest point) weighing less than many laptops at 1.8kg. Minimum projection range is 0.84m; expect a 60" screen at 1.7 - 3.4m distance or a 100" screen at 2.7 - 5.6m. (Overall, screen sizes range from 15" to a theoretical 300".) Final details: 16+ million colors, contrast ratio 1800:1, mono speaker.

More information: http://www.casio.co.jp/release/2008/xjs57_s52.html (Japanese)