The first generation of pico projectors sort of landed with a thud; their lackluster performance and poor battery life, combined with a relatively high price, have pretty much relegated them to “experimental” status. The major releases were Optoma’s PK101, 3M’s MPro 110, Dell’s whatever-it-was. Recently 3M has updated their pico to the MPro 120, which you’ll see a review for shortly, and now Optoma has improved their offering and iterated its version number as well. We’re waiting on you, Dell!

The new PK102 has some serious improvements. The contrast ratio has been doubled, for one thing, to 2000:1. Wery nice. But the big move is that it now has 4GB of on-board memory and a on-screen menu with which to navigate it. That’s certainly big enough for a couple episodes of this or that, or a few home movies. This solves the problem of having to carry around something to output through the projector, which reduced its utility somewhat. That gives it a definite edge over the MPro 120, but I’d have to see them side by side to see if the image on one is better.

The price is also much lower, at $250 (the MPro is $350). Do we have a winner? On paper (or rather, on screen), it appears so.