compact projector

Happy summer, DormDelicious readers! Hope you are spending your time productively, by which we mean browsing DormDelicious while bored at your summer internship.

As you may guess, we here at DormDelicious get a ton of e-mails all the time about college products, dorm decorating websites, and on and on. Well, we just started sifting through them, deleting the ads for male enhancement products (or saving them for later?) and we're ready to present to you our first Dorm Room Link Party of the summer: The Summer Inbox Edition. For this edition, we checked out all the links we've been sent over the last few weeks and picked out some gems we thought you should check out. Without further ado...

What would summer be without... an inflatable beer pong table?

PortoPong thinks no pool should be without beer pong (or beirut if you want to be a jerk about it). Well, we here at DormDelicious say, why not?! Unless of course, you are under 21, in which case you should be playing water pong. But not with the pool water. Never with the pool water.

BenQ is giving away GP1 Mini Projectors and gift cards until August 19th!

The company behind the Joybee GP1 compact projector [read our review] is giving some away, along with ten gift cards, to people who share a story about how to have fun economically. And if there's anything college students should know, it's how to have fun on a budget!

Also, as a special bonus to DormDelicious readers, use the code COL0001 if you buy one of these projectors and get a free 2 year warranty.

Design Your Dorm lets you, uh, design your dorm

We've seen a couple products since launching DormDelicious that help you lay out your dorm before you get there, but DYD definitely has the most curb appeal (and is the most aptly named). The interface is slick, and lets you see a 3D model of your dorm. You can add products and then it lets you know where to buy them. Definitely worth checking out.

[ Continue reading Dorm Room Link Party - Summer Inbox Edition → ]

There are lots of reasons to get a projector for your dorm room. Obviously, it's cool to play movies, TV, and video games on a big screen. Believe me, the ladies will love watching Steel Magnolias and seeing Tom Skerritt's lovable face larger than life. Also, a projector is great for parties - we've projected movies, music videos, and other cool visuals on the wall with the sound off and it's always a hit.

When we received a request to review the Joybee GP1 Mini Projector, we jumped at the chance, as we spent both junior and senior year of college enjoying having a projector in our dorm, and then in our off campus house.

It all started junior year, when one of our roommates brought home a rented projector and screen over the weekend that he needed for a presentation. After spending nearly every hour that weekend watching movies in awe of the size and quality we never turned back. We immediately turned to eBay, but there are a number of problems with projectors that are within the college budget.

First, most of the worthwhile projectors you'll find in this price range are used so the lamp will have quite a few hours of use on it, and lamps are insanely expensive to replace. Second, the technology is old so the hardware is large, runs hot, won't have a lot of video connectivity options, and likely won't be very bright. We ended up with a decent projector, but it took a long time to warm up, and if you didn't have it positioned perfectly the image looked warped.

Luckily, the BenQ Joybee GP1 has come to the rescue! It's small, lightweight, extremely bright, comes loaded with input options, and solves a number of problems that plague lower cost projectors. Read on for our full review...

[ Continue reading BenQ Joybee GP1 Review → ]