Up Against the Wall

John McDonough

Hooking a 17-inch monitor to a notebook is a cost-effective way to make a presentation to a small group of people sitting around a table. For larger groups, however, you need projection. You can buy an LCD panel that sits on an overhead projector or a self-contained projection unit. In either case, your notebook drives the display. Wedge Technology's ShowBiz 5000P ($4799) provides another option.

The ShowBiz 5000P is a Pentium notebook with an LCD that converts into an overhead projection panel. Like a few projection notebooks before it (see "Presentation Quality," September 1995 BYTE), the ShowBiz 5000P lets you make large-room presentations at any office with an overhead projector. While the ShowBiz 5000P is best for software demo nstrations, Wedge also offers optional MPEG playback and TV cards, so you can project videos 6 feet high on a screen.

We found the LCD projection panel easy to set up. After removing a protective back panel from behind the ShowBiz 5000P's 10.4-inch active-matrix display, you place the LCD panel on an overhead projector. A support tray for the notebook itself attaches to the projector. The display supports 800- by 600-pixel resolutions at 65,536 colors. The unit comes with a cooling fan that connects to the LCD panel to dissipate the heat from the projector's lamp.

Though the projected images are not as bright as on some desktop projectors (see the review "Road-Show Romance"), we found the images to be clear and well defined when shown in a fairly dark room. It takes some adjustment of the LCD projection panel to eliminate ambient light from the overhead projector, but that should not be a problem after you get used to setting it up.

The notebook sits directly in the path of the ov erhead projector, so Wedge supplies an infrared-attached remote-control device so the presenter can control the PC. Mind Path's Presentation F/X software lets you move the mouse around the display and zoom in on different areas of the screen.

---

Product Information

ShowBiz 5000P..................$4799 (fully loaded system}

Wedge Technology, Inc.
Milpitas, CA
Phone:    (408) 263-9888
Internet: 
http://www.wedgetech.com

Circle 1080 on Inquiry Card.

HotBYTEs
 - information on products covered or advertised in BYTE

---

Effective Overheads from a Notebook

photo_link (28 Kbytes)