This post gives an introduction to wireless LCD projectors, what Wi-Fi standards they follow, whether you can display audio and video over the wireless mode, is there is a delay while presenting a power point slide over wireless, Advantages, disadvantages of wireless projectors and special features that can be enabled in some wireless projectors.

Wi-Fi has pretty much revolutionized networking. A lot of networked devices come with built in Wireless radios for easier connectivity. By now, you should have seen people connecting their laptops to the LCD projectors without using those long cables. They must be using Wi-Fi to connect to their projectors.

The long cables over the conference room table has always been a glitch, even though they are concealed as much as possible. And there is also a restriction to the maximum distance that such cables could travel (VGA Cables) and if the cable is very long (longer than 20-25 meters in length), there is a reduction in quality of the displayed pictures in the projector screen.

That’s where Wireless projectors come in handy. You could just mount the projector in the ceiling of the room, connect a laptop to it over Wi-Fi and you can start projecting from anywhere in the room (you can even connect the projector from outside the room as Wi-Fi is not based on Line of Sight – LOS). These wireless projectors need IEEE 802.11 b/g based laptop wireless adaptors in the Laptops to connect to them. And most of the laptops today have these adaptors. Since they follow the IEEE standard, any Wi-Fi projector can work with any Laptop make.

Not everything is rosy, though. When you project a power point presentation over the wireless, there is a small delay from the time you press the button for the next slide and the slide actually appearing in the projector screen. That is because, the laptops transmit the information to the projectors after compressing them and sometimes after encrypting them. Some projectors do not support the display of video or flash moving images to be projected over wireless. But some do. You need to install a wireless application client in every laptop that wants to connect to a particular projector, over the wireless and this is a proprietary piece of software which is unique to that particular projector manufacturer. You need to also check if your wireless projector allows the laptop to connect to the projector and internet over Wi-Fi simultaneously to display web pages live over the projector. Many of them don’t allow that as they form a Peer-to-Peer (Ad-hoc connection) network over the laptop. Your board room projector is not a network projector – it cannot connect to the Wi-Fi network and automatically load some files from servers to present them as it does not have any built-in memory. It can do it only through a laptop/PC.

But there are some wireless projectors which give much more functionalities than just wireless connection between the laptop and projector. They enable video, sound and data to be presented over the wireless mode. So, all you need is a power cord to set up the projector. The wireless adaptor is generally built in to the projector so you don’t need to attach any thing extra to enable wireless connection. Some projectors do allow the laptops to be simultaneously connected to the network (wired or wireless) while they are connected to the projectors over the wireless mode. Even if you don’t have the remote, some projectors allow you to connect to them from the laptop over the wireless mode and adjust the settings like keystone, brightness, contrast, etc.

Interestingly, in the wireless mode, some projectors allow multiple laptops to be connected to it simultaneously. Remember those VGA Switchers? Where multiple projectors would be connected through a cable to it, and there was a switch which determines which Laptop’s content is allowed to be presented in the projector screen. Forget all that, now you could connect multiple laptops to the projector over the wireless mode and use the remote control to decide if all the Laptop’s content need to be projected simultaneously (by splitting the screens) or any one of them need to be projected in the full screen and then toggle to the next laptop screen after some time, by just pressing a button. You could also do the reverse – You could connect one laptop to more than a single projector simultaneously over the wireless mode and have the same presentation projected in all the screens. This could be useful in situations where there is a big auditorium, and a separate projector is needed at the back  or one in the left and one in the right.

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