What was used for the test

I used a Compaq Microprojector, my iPAQ, and the Voyager VGA card, with the IA Presenter software.

What is IA Presenter?

IA Presenter Suite is a convenient multimedia presentation and photo album toolkit for the Pocket PC.

How Does it Work

In order to use the software to display Powerpoint slides you will need to convert your Powerpoint into JPEG or GIF files. This is relatively easy in Powerpoint 2000, you simply chose JPEG or GIF from the save as type menu. Powerpoint asks you if you want to save all slides or just the current one. If you choose to save all it saves each file into an individual JPEG in a directory whose name is the name of your presentation. I then moved the JPEGs over to my iPAQ shared directory where they are then syncronised to the iPAQ. Any transitions or effects are lost during the transtion, however IA Presenter has it's own effects and transitions that you can add back in.

The Software

Is very easy to use, and simple to install. Once installed and fired up you are presented with thumbnails of the available slides (converted JPEGS in my case).

Features

One thing I hadn't expected is that IA Present is much more than a tool for displaying powerpoint slides. It has the following features:

• Slide Show Control - Displays full screen either on the iPAQ or through the VGA card. Also allows you to change attributes such as resolution, color palette, image dithering, orientation, and transition effects. You can also change slide display order, add audio etc. You can also zoom into select areas of an image.
• Screen Mirroring - whatever is on the iPAQ screen is show through the VGA card.
• Image Viewing/Browsing - Allows you to view either thumbnail or full JPEG, BMP, 2BP, GIF (still and animated) files then zoom, rotate them.
  
• Image File Management - from here you can move, copy, delete files.
• Screen Capturing - screen capture to user defined folders with user defined names.
• File Sharing - email or send images over Infra red.

Quality of displayed images

The quality is perfectly acceptable for displaying Powerpoint presentations. However the images are not as sharp as displaying the powerpoint directly from a laptop, you get a slight blurring of letters. This may be due to the JPEG compression.

The image below is the same slide displayed via my iPAQ and then I have super-imposed the image from my laptop on the right hand side. The ipaq image is darker, but can be made lighter using the standard iPAQ brightness tool.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Lots of effects
• More than just a Powerpoint display tool

Cons

• Image quality not as good as laptop display
• Unable to edit Powerpoint slides