Need a laptop to drive a WUXGA projector

In clone mode, in general you have the same screen resolution on both(it will match the lower of the screens/projectors/tvs).older setups used to pan(so you would see the area around the mouse on the lower resolution screen. kind of looked like using the Windows magnifier) the lower resolution screen, but I have not seen this in some time.

You can just swap to the projector or use it as a secondary display at its full screen resolution. As far as driving a screen that resolution, video cards(even onboard) have gotten more then fast enough to do this job for video(and web browsing). I have not run power point in a while, but would guess it should be fine as well.

Thanks, nukemaste. You confirmed what I had thought to be the case. In order to use the projector at wuxga we will have to run the laptop in extended mode instead of clone mode. Unless of course, we can find a wuxga laptop at a reasonable price.

We use this projector primarily for digital still images for competitions. No videos or gaming.

If you just want to view images, I HIGHLY recommend you give Irfanview a try. It is mainly an image viewer, but it is extremely light weight and can also scale images to make them look better in full screen(since your camera is taking images far bigger then the screen resolution) without much performance loss.

Irfanview is much slower(5-6 seconds vs 0.3-0.4 seconds for the jpeg image) at opening RAW images(and lacks many features for dealing with them) so I would recommend sticking with normal(jpg) images.

The image conversion gets better(they have a basic save for web and devices similar to photoshops(optimize for web and devices). Jpeg compression is not as good as photoshop yet, but make sure chroma subsample is OFF if you compress lots of reds) all the time on this program, but watch out. I do not remember it coming with any kind of browser bar offers or anything, but things like that can be tossed into freeware installers.

http://www.irfanview.com/

EDIT.

If you use Irfanview, hit "Options -> Sort Directory files -> By extension" so it does not open jpeg then raw then jpeg then raw if you are saving raw images then using the full screen slide show.

We do use Irfanview. It works great for our purpose. Images are all submitted as jpg. Currently, we use an old XP laptop projecting at 1024x768 resolution. Kind of a waste since the projector could do 1920x1200.

The computer has no option to change the resolution?

My rather old geforce 4mx based laptop was able to push 1920 x 1200 over analog VGA if you have that as an option.

We can push the resolution to 1920x1200 analog but were concerned about image degradation using an analog connection.

I really could not argue with our projection coordinator since I didn't know enough about the issues concerning analog versus digital.

Well to be honest, I have used VGA at 1920 x 1200 and as long as the cable is good, It would only be noticeable on small text(and just noticeable).

That said, a 24 inch computer screen is not nearly as big as your projector screen. I would honestly give it a go since it is still going to be better then 1024 x 768.