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The slide show is dead...long live the side show--digital style. Sure it costs as much as a decent DSLR, but it's just the ticket for getting your shots in front of lots of people, whether at a Photo Meetup or your one man show. We're planning on looking at a series of digital projectors for critical viewing, and we're starting with the lightweight, extremely versatile Epson PowerLight 1735W.

In 1973, Paul Simon released one of his best known songs, and certainly the most fondly remembered by anyone into photography back then. "Kodachrome" was a love song to color slide photography, and the Kodak slide medium deserved the affection of a generation (or three) of photographers. Sure, the neighbors had to sit through a few more slide shows in the basement than they may have thought they needed to, but for the first time amateurs could display their images with the same size, vivid color and clarity that pros did. Simon spoke for more than one generation when he sang, "I've got a Nikon camera, I love to take photographs...Mama don't take my Kodachrome away...."

Well, it's 36 years later and sadly, Kodak has announced the end of Kodachrome, and the age of the slide projector is well and truly a time gone by. Now, whether you're working from scanned slides, or much more likely, directly from digital files, you need digital output to share them with others.

Print captures nuance that projectors can't, or so we've always believed, but when it comes to wowing an audience, there's nothing like a big screen. And for that you need a projector. But not your father's slide projector.

Maybe something along the lines of Epson's Powerlite 1735W.

The Powerlite 1735W is an advanced digital LCD projector that takes USB drives for input as easily as the host of other cabled input options, including going directly into your computer via USB cable, has 1600x1200 resolution output and sophisticated color profiling.

Of course, it's not a slide projector at all, but while you may think of LCD projectors in terms of corporate presentations, watching movies, or even for gaming, you should also be thinking about how you're going to show your photographic output. How to show it big, bold, and with credible color rendering.

Out Of The Box
Picking up the box gives you warning that the 1735W is light, really light. Even so, it's not until you take it out of the packaging in its handy nylon carrying case (with all its accessories stowed) that you get an real feel for how light it is. Without accessories, it's less than four pounds, which is subnotebook range in laptop weight. But what it lacks in pounds it makes up for in features.

It comes wrapped in its black nylon shoulder bag, which is nicely laid out with pockets for all its gear and manuals.

Physically setting up the unit is simple, as you'd expect. A front foot drops down, giving you about 15 degrees of up angle, which is plenty. the rear feet twist out to provide right left balance and the keystone controls are easily located on top of the unit. Plugging the power cord in gives you an amber light and startup takes 30 seconds. Shutdown is really fast, by the way, taking five seconds from double tapping the off switch to fan shutdown. Source search lets you choose from multiple inputs, but if you only have one source, the projector will find it for you.

We tried out the wirelessly enabled version, which meant we had to unscrew the side to plug the wireless module in, but I can't really claim that was a hardship. The Wi-Fi part has two pieces, one which gets plugged into the projector, and the other, a USB key plugs into the computer. First though you have to plug the key into the rear USB port of the projector so it can download network information. If your computer doesn't have a wireless connection, it won't give you one, so it's clearly more useful for laptops than desktops...but who uses desktops anymore?

In fact, who uses computers? One of the really great things about the 1735W is that it's perfectly capable of showing media from a USB drive or digital camera, and the remote lets you navigate through the folders and images, showing the photos individually or in sideshows. The remote also enables a pointer and zoom functions so you can obsess over detail to your heart's content.

I did run into a few glitches with the USB display, since several of the images I wanted to show returned a "cannot play" error. They were images I'd worked on in Adobe Photoshop,

Running without a computer you do your selection and adjustment on screen, which is pretty simple using either the remote or a gamepad on the unit. You get a number of basic display settings, including game, presentation, theater, text, and our favorite: photo. If that's not enough, you can also choose sRGB or Custom and play with the settings yourself.

As I said earlier, we were primarily interested in the Powerlite 1735W for display of photography, and we took it down to the Alexandria Photography Workshop to try it out at a photography critique. The consensus was mixed, even after we played with the brightness and settings. The images looked great, and the high resolution output really paid off, but the highlights still tended to blow out on us. Now, that's something that you could adjust for in your images, and our tests weren't scientific at all...just a bunch of photographers fiddling with the controls. Let there be no question about whether we liked the unit overall...there were tears when we shipped it back to Epson.

In the end, it's a terrifically versatile unit that offers a lot of image control. It's light, but powerful and we love the ability to show images directly from the USB, but make sure it will read the USB drive before showing up with your career critical presentation.