Projectors don’t have to be confined to
a home theater, you could project a screen, or how about here, or maybe even here. Today on the hookup I’ve got 8 of Amazon’s
best selling portable projectors from companies like Kodak, Benq and Anker and I’m going
to run them through a bunch of tests to figure out which one is the best, and if any of them
are worth buying. While you could use these projectors in a
home theater setup, their main purpose is to be able to project a screen wherever you
want, whenever you want with almost no setup time. In this video I’m going to test out things
like brightness, battery life, focus uniformity, fan noise, latency, speaker fidelity, app
compatibility and of course picture quality, and then based on that data I’ll let you
know which projectors I think are worth buying but if you want to check out the data yourself
there’s a link to a google sheet down in the description. Thank you to microcenter for sponsoring this
video. I grew up in Columbus Ohio about a mile from
the very first micro center, and as I kid walking around inside it was more exciting
than going to a candy store. Today it’s more of the same, microcenter
is one of the only stores that you can walk in and find shelves full of 3d printers, Security
Cameras, maker specific tools, and even portable projectors like the ones in this video. If you’re lucky enough to live near a micro
center and you’ve never been, you should definitely go in and check out their amazing
selection and passionate employees. There’s even a link in the description for
a coupon to get a free 240 gigabyte SSD. For everyone else Microcenter.com has just
as many great products at competitive prices so you’ll be sure to find something for
you or the techy in your life. A quick introduction of each of the projectors
in this video because they vary quite a bit in size and form factor, starting from least
expensive to most we’ve got the $179 EZCast Beam J2, then the $299 Kodak Luma 350, the
$339 Viewsonic M1 plus, and wrapping it up for this flat form factor is the $488 AAXA
M7. After that we’ve got the larger portable
projectors starting with the $499 BENQ GV30, then the $503 WEMAX Dice, the $549 Anker Mars
II Pro, and the most expensive projector in this video is the $680 XGIMI Halo. Let’s get started by comparing their brightness
and battery life. The standard measurement for projector brightness
is the ANSI Lumen and It’s calculated by projecting a pure white screen and dividing
it 9 sections. You take an individual brightness measurement
in each section using a lux meter and calculate the average reading. After calculating that average you multiply
that by the screen size in square meters and that gives you ANSI lumens. I measured each projector’s ANSI Lumens
in both their high brightness and battery saving modes and found that the XGIMI and
Anker in high brightness mode were the brightest at 518 and 516 ANSI lumens respectively, and
in battery saving mode the Anker Mars II blew the rest of the projectors out of the water
with 307 ANSI lumens compared to the next best which was the AAXA with 122. However, just having a higher brightness battery
saving mode doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t actually save batteries. So I ran full battery drain tests in each
brightness mode and I also calculated something I called efficiency by multiplying the ANSI
lumens by the number of minutes the projector was able to play a movie at that brightness. Of all the tests I did for this video, this
one had the most definitive result with the Anker Mars II absolutely destroying the rest
of the projectors with 66000 lumen minutes on high brightness mode and a huge 81000 lumen
minutes of efficiency on battery saving mode which translated to 4 hours and 24 minutes
at over 300 ANSI lumens. I used the extended directors cut of Return
of the King because I figured none of these projectors would be up to the task of finishing
that absurdly long movie, but the Anker Mars Pro II managed to make all the way through
the credits, and I had to rewind it to finish the test. The XGIMI also did well on battery saving
mode lasting 3 hours and 41 minutes but with only 103 ANSI lumens giving it a lumen minutes
score of just 23000 compared to the Anker’s 81000. On high brightness mode the Anker was just
as impressive lasting 128 minutes at 516 lumens, while the XGIMI put out 518 lumens for 56
minutes before automatically switching to low power mode for an additional 30 minutes
and then powering off. And before we move on from brightness I should
also mention that the AAXA has something called boost mode that is only available when plugged
in, but it put out a very respectable 648 ANSI lumens, which was the highest in this
video and looked great even though it sounds a bit like a jet engine in the process. The brightness uniformity on all these projectors
was also exceptional. In my last video the best performer had a
brightness deviation of 46% meaning the dimmest region of the screen was 46% dimmer than the
brightest region, but in this lineup the Anker Mars Pro II took the top spot with less than
8% deviation on battery saving mode. As I said, all these projectors in this video
did significantly better than normal LED projectors probably due to the fact that they aren’t
using a large frenal lens to focus the light source. So after brightness and battery testing, the
Anker Mars II Pro seems like the obvious choice, but we’ve got lots more things to consider,
and next ones are clarity and focus uniformity. Image clarity is basically the result of the
native resolution of the projector and the quality of the focusing lens. The Kodak, EZCast and Viewsonic projectors
are all 480p native resolution and as a result when you project a large screen you can not
only see individual pixels, but also a slight screen door effect which is when the space
in between pixels makes it look like you are looking through a screen door. The Benq and Anker have a 720p native resolution
which means individual pixels are less visible but still noticeable if you are looking for
them. I didn’t see any screen door effect with
the 720p projectors and from normal viewing distance they looked perfectly acceptable,
if not just a little bit soft on focus. The AAXA, WEMAX and XGIMI are all 1080p native
which gave a totally crisp and clear image even when projecting a 100” screen. The AAXA did do slightly worse in my clarity
test due to its motorized focus system which didn’t have small enough adjustment increments
for me to get it dialed in perfectly. Under normal circumstances you’d probably
never notice it, but in a test specifically designed to look at focus I could tell the
image was a bit fuzzy compared to the others. The next thing I measured was focus uniformity
where I project text into the center and each of the four corners and score the focus of
each zone from 1-10, 1 being completely out of focus and 10 being the same clarity as
the center text. The XGIMI Halo performed extremely well in
this test with an average score of 9.75, followed by the other two 1080p projectors the AAXA
and the WEMAX and then the Anker and Benq 720p projectors. So now that we’ve tested the individual
parts, theoretically overall viewing experience should be some combination of brightness,
clarity, and focus uniformity, but in practice what I’ve found is that color accuracy and
contrast ratio also make a huge difference. In order to score their overall viewing experience
I projected a 100” screen and filmed each projector with my Sony A6600 on manual mode
so the relative brightness of each projector would be visible. There are a few things that I want to point
out before we start: First the screen door effect of the 480p projectors also produces
a pretty pronounced moiré effect on the recorded footage, but it isn’t visible in person. You can see that when I stop the video on
a single frame interference lines go away, so just know that although the 480p doesn’t
look great in person, the recording makes it look even worse than it actually is. Second, on most of the recorded footage you’ll
see some faint banding on the video caused by the refresh rate of the projector not being
completely in sync with the camera, I did my best to find a common shutter speed that
would reduce banding, but specifically the Anker Mars II Pro didn’t match up well with
the 1/80 shutter speed and has more banding than the other projectors, but none of the
banding is visible in person. With that out of the way, what you are about
to see is a single elimination head to head showdown of each projector ranked by price
with using the dolby reference video at the bottom. The first matchup was the EZCast Beam vs Kodak
Luma 350, and neither of them were what I would call good, but I don’t necessarily
think these projectors are supposed to used for a 100 in screen. As I said, the video looks a little worse
than it did in person, but I will say that I thought the Kodak was slightly less bad,
so it moved on to round two. And that meant the Kodak Luma was up against
the Viewsonic M1+, and again, neither of them were great on a screen this size and individual
pixels were clearly visible, but the Kodak managed a second win by having better contrast
and color accuracy. So then it was the 480p 187 lumen Kodak Luma
vs the 1080p 505 lumen aaxa M7, and the matchup went pretty much exactly as you’d expect. The bright colors and crisp image on the aaxa
M7 were more than enough to win the round against the kodak despite some inaccurate
in color and lower than average contrast. After that the aaxa went up against the 720p
BENQ GV30 which I figured didn’t stand a chance with it’s slightly lower resolution
and significantly lower brightness, but the GV30’s contrast ratio was the hero of the
day and even though the overall image wasn’t as bright as the AAXA the color accuracy,
saturation, and contrast on the GV30 couldn’t be ignored and I thought it easily won this
round. After that the BENQ GV30 took on another 1080p
projector the WEMAX Dice and again the BENQ’s color accuracy and contrast were more than
enough to make up for the lower brightness and lower native resolution. Certain scenes like the lava in the volcano
looked pretty cool on the WEMAX dice with it’s over exaggerated colors and brightness,
while others scenes like the golden gate bridge flyover looked extremely oversaturated with
inaccurate colors and a bunch of detail lost in the darker areas. For this round, watching the projectors side
by side there was no question for me and I chose the BENQ GV30. So next both 720p projectors went head to
head, the BENQ GV30 against the Anker Mars II Pro, which seemed like the best projector
from a brightness and battery life standpoint. Unfortunately the Anker just couldn’t even
come close to the BENQ and the Anker’s lack of contrast really distracted from the overall
picture quality. In addition to that the colors on the Anker
were also too blue it had had much worse black levels than the BENQ, giving the BENQ GV30
a 3rd easy win. So in the last round the 720p, 187lumen BENQ
GV30 went up against the most expensive projector in this video the $680 XGIMI Halo with it’s
1080p native resolution and 518 lumens, and it was the closest matchup yet. The XGIMI had a similar great contrast ratio
to the BENQ while also having high brightness and good black levels. The only mark against the XGIMI was the oversaturated
colors that you typically get when you put a TV on the “Vivid” image setting. Still it was hard to argue with the XGIMI’s
performance and I did give it the slight edge over the GV30 in overall viewing experience
putting in first place. After some additional consolation rounds to
figure out the lower ranks, this was the overall ranking for viewing experience on a 100 inch
projection screen in a reasonably dark room. But wait, there’s still more. Because these projectors are supposed to be
portable, they also need to provide good enough speakers to not only enjoy the movie, but
also be loud enough to be heard outside or with ambient noise. After listening to the same clip hundreds
of times I ended up with these rankings, and found that this small clip recorded with my
Rode shotgun microphone did the good job illustrating the different volume and sound quality of
each projector which I ranked from 8 which was the worst to 1 which was the best. I’ll play them all first, then give you
my opinion. You can hear that the loudest projector was
the WEMAX Dice while the BENQ GV30 was not quite as loud, but avoided the distortion
that you can hear on the WEMAX which is why I put it in first place. You can also hear the ambient noise of each
projector which was by far the loudest on the AAXA and basically non-existent on the
XGIMI. The Kodak fans weren’t loud, but it did
have a high pitch whine that I found extremely annoying. Lets play those clips one more time. Alright, so that’s gotta be it, right? Not yet. Most of these projectors are also smart projectors
with built in apps, which is nice since they’re supposed to be an all-in-one unit that you
can just set down and turn on. I read a bunch of reviews for these projectors
and some people said that hulu worked, but Netflix didn’t or Disney plus was laggy
while YouTubeTV played fine, so I just said screw it, subscribed to every major streaming
service and tested them out on each of the projectors. And here’s how they did, you’ll notice
some of the boxes have footnotes for things that I had to do to make them work properly,
if you’re curious what any of those are you can leave a comment or just go read them
yourself on the google sheet the link in the description. If you want to avoid these incompatibilities,
you can use an external streaming stick like a google chromecast since all of these projectors
HDMI input and the viewsonic and benq also have USB-C display capabilities. However, if you want to hook up a video game
console to those external inputs you should take note of the input lag for each projector
which I measured against my LG C9 TV in gaming mode which has a well tested and documented
input lag of 13.5 milliseconds. Using an HDMI splitter I ran a synchronized
60fps video into each projector and my TV and recorded them with a gopro at 120 frames
per second. You can see that all the projectors are at
least 1 frame behind the TV’s image, so we can calculate their input lag by multiplying
how many frames different from the TV they were by 16.6 which is the number of milliseconds
per frame, and then add on the 13.5 millisecond lag of the LG C9 which gives us these input
lag values. Generally speaking input lag under 50ms will
be indistinguishable for casua l gaming while anything from 50-100ms will
start to feel a little strange and over 100ms becomes a problem for things like jumping
and aiming and can lead to a pretty bad experience. So, now the big question. Are any of them worth buying? Yes, but in my opinion it’s probably not
the ones you think. My first recommendation is the Anker Mars
II Pro for people who want to bring a projector camping, or to a tailgate to project a moderately
sized screen onto a wall, the side of a tent, or even a car. The Mars II Pro has great battery life, great
brightness, nice loud sound, and decent app compatibility except for YouTubeTV which sucks
if you want to watch sports. Its only other faults were color accuracy
and contrast ratio, which probably aren’t your biggest concerns when projecting onto
random surfaces. The Mars II Pro also has a Bluetooth speaker
mode that shuts off the projector and even though I didn’t specifically test the speaker
mode battery, I can’t imagine it would be less than 20 or 30 hours given that the projector
mode gives almost 5 hours of battery life. At $549 the value of the Anker Mars II Pro
is a little bit questionable, but it’s recently been on sale for as little as $369 which is
an absolute steal for a projector with these kinds of features. My second recommendation is the projector
that finished dead last in almost every category: The EZCast Beam J2. This projector is the perfect tool for an
artist who wants to project onto a wall to paint murals. It’s pocket size, wire free, lightweight,
has a massive 6 hour battery life on low brightness, has a quarter 20 tripod mount on the bottom,
and most importantly 4 point keystoning. Just put your art on a USB drive, plug it
into the back of the EZCast, set the keystone, and you’re good to go. I really can’t recommend the EZCast for
watching movies, but as an art projector it’s easy worth the $179 price tag. And now we need to talk about the top performers
and why those aren’t the ones I’m recommending? The XGIMI halo has great brightness, the best
picture quality, almost perfect app compatibility, and good sound with no fan noise… Honestly, it’s a really impressive package
for a portable projector. However, using it on high brightness you’re
going to get less than an hour of battery life, which isn’t enough for a movie and
definitely not enough for a football game, which means you’re usually going to need
to plug it in, and if that’s the case, do you really need a portable projector? In addition to better sound and a more compact
form factor some of the lesser known advantages of a portable projector are internal components
that are more resistant to being rattled around, less heat generation, and maybe the biggest
difference is the ability to project and focus an extremely small screen. Most traditional projectors can go as small
as a 35” screen, but these portable projectors can go as small as 5”, and I’m not sure
why you’d want to do that, but it’s to know you can. If those differences aren’t important to
you and you just want a good projector then for the $680 price of the XGIMI Halo you’re
pretty close to being able to afford a decently high end traditional bulb based projector
like the BENQ TH681ST which paired with a chromecast gives you full app compatibility
and over 5 times the brightness, making much better for bright environments. The same goes for the BENQ GV30, which automatically
switched from high brightness to battery saving mode after 46 minutes but had great app compatibility,
the best color accuracy and contrast, and great sound. The BENQ GV30 also has my favorite mounting
solution with a magnetic base that lets you roll the projector to easily adjust the angle
for projection onto a table or ceiling and automatically adjusts the vertical keystone,
but again unless portability is a major sticking point for you, $499 seems like a lot to pay
for 187 ANSI lumens and 720p resolution. If you’re on a budget some of the non portable
1080p LED projectors from my last video were in the 450 ANSI lumen range for around $150. As I said, you miss on the small form factor,
good speakers and the ability to project smaller screens, but the value is hard to argue with. So what do you think? Am I being too hard on these portable projectors? Am I missing some big use case here? If so, let me know down in the comments. I’ve got links to all the projectors I tested
in this video down in the description and if you do decide to buy one I’d appreciate
if you use those links since it as an Amazon affiliate I earn a small portion of the sale
at no cost to you. Thank you so much to my awesome patrons over
at patreon for your continued support of my channel, and if you’re interested in supporting
my channel please check out the links in the description. If you enjoyed this video please hit that
thumbs up button and consider subscribing, and as always, thanks for watching the hookup.
