Multimedia projection company Proxima Corp is aiming to increase its European market share significantly and raise brand awareness, with the move of its European headquarters to the UK and the launch of a truly portable projector. The San Diego, California-based company reckons it has about 25% of the projection market in the US, close behind rival In Focus Systems Inc, but no more than 17% share in Europe. It is looking for at least the 25% it enjoys in the US, and has appointed a new Europea n vice-president, Richard Kemp, to build a sales and marketing team and raise the company’s profile. European headquarters have moved to Marlow, UK from Maastricht in the Netherlands. The company expects to grow the team to around 25 people from 10, by the year-end. It has launched Lightbook, its first offering in the portable projector market. Lightbook weighs less than 11 lbs, and comes with a notebook computer-type carrying case. It uses a liquid crystal display with standard 640 by 480 resolution, and currently supports VGA, with Super VGA ‘fit-to-view’, enabling projection of part of a screen if Super VGA is required. The brightness is 250 ANSI Lumens. It projects a large image even from the front of a room, and has built-in keyston e correction with a manual correction as well, to retain a square image however close the unit is to the screen. The unit has an integrated auto switching international power supply, for use worldwide, and a back-up bulb which can be simply changed on the fly. The company has also launched a new projector in its high-end range, the DP 4200, aimed at meetings of 30 to 50 people. It has brightness of 400 ANSI Lumens, enabling projection in daylight, and uses Texas Instruments Inc’s Digital Light Processing Technology, which reflects light off tiny mirrors on a CMOS chip, giving a high level of clarity and detail. DP4200 supports full Super VGA resolution. The MediaExpress option enables a presentation to be projected directly from the projector, without connection to a personal computer. Presentations created in any desktop software package can be output to floppy disk in Adobe Systems Inc’s Portable Document Format, loaded into the projector’s floppy drive, and played directly from the projector. A hard disk option is also available, to enable storage of multiple presentations. Both projectors support all Windows and Macintosh personal computers. They will ship towards the end of October. Lightbook will cost around $7,000 and DP 4200 $11,500.
