Fujitsu Lifebook S761/C and P771/C Replace Optical Drives With Pico Projectors

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A surprise emerges from the folks at Fujitsu, who likely aren’t the first name you think of when you think of laptops. But in an era increasingly marked by not having physical possession of your media, thanks to the great amorphous entity known as “the cloud”, it’s clear where Fujitsu’s stand on the physical media vs. nonphysical storage debate stands, and it’s clearly with the nonphysical. Their new LifeBook S761/c and LifeBook P771/C laptops are proof positive, because they’ve taken out the optical drives and replaced them with pico projectors.

This is actually a pretty clever design, as you can see from the pic above. Not only did they take out the drive, but they left the enclosure in place. Now, instead of leaving a big gaping hole in the side of the laptop, or just filling it in with extra plastic or the like, they’ve replaced it with a pico projector mounted on a kind of swing arm, letting you get the monitor out of the way so it doesn’t block off part of the display.

As for the specs itself, the LifeBook S761/c is a 13.3 inch laptop that offers a 1366 x 768 display, an Intel Core i5-2520M processor, a gig of RAM, and 160 gig of storage (with a number that small I’m guessing it’s a solid state drive rather than a hard drive). The P771/C, meanwhile, offers the same specs, but with a 12.1 inch display showing at 1280 x 800 resolution. The pico projector involved doesn’t have any specs available, sadly, though if the resolution is anywhere near as good as those of the monitors you’ll likely be pretty impressed.

The LifeBook S761/C will be coming to Japan first (and hopefully a wider release later) for 219,450 yen ($2675 US). Meanwhile, you can get the LifeBook P771/C for 255,150 yen ($3110 US), and both of these will be available starting in mid-May. I love the idea, admittedly, though I’m a bit concerned on the pricing as, in many cases, you can get some pretty nice pico projectors that will hook right into your laptop for a much lower cost. There’s value in having the collapsible nature, of course, but the normal pico projector doesn’t take a lot of room in a laptop bag.

So would you pick one of these up if you could? I like the idea, myself, but I’m not so sure about the execution.