Sub-$150 projector, asking for trouble?

January 29, 2019 1:52 PM

Targeted internet advertising seems to think that I want a cheap projector. Are these all the garbage engines of heartbreak my natural pessimism knows them to be, or the bright sparkly fun machines the astroturf promises?

I know the resolutions are not 1920x1080 and that's okay. I just want it to be bright enough to watch movies and play video games on a wall. I might even paint it with reflective paint. I watch a few "deal" sites and have seen a few go by for ~$100 which is cheap enough that I could justify it if I knew basic functionality was okay and it wouldn't fall to pieces in 6 months.

In theory, it uses an LED lamp and is less likely to burn out. The resolution is fine for netflix and nintendo. It won't make distracting noise and I can hook it up to my stereo rather than rely on internal speakers.

Every one I see for sale in this price range seems to be a clone of every other one, so it's hard to get reliable first hand reviews and be sure you're actually looking at the same thing you're lined up to buy. Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe they're all basically okay-ish enough. Or maybe they're all garbage.

Uncertainty determines parsimony.

Have you bought one and thought it was great? Or did it fall apart, burn out, set fire to your dog, etc? Are they worth taking a chance on or should I continue to not buy the $600 models that provide higher resolution, reliability, and a warranty that might be worth something?

posted by roue to Technology (17 answers total)

What's the lumens? And I'm drawing a blank on the term for the distance between projector and surface (throw? is that just for candle scent?), but what's that?

This is where the cheap projectors get you. It is extremely annoying to use a projector when it needs to be so close to the screen it's going to be between you and the screen, and it sucks when you have to turn off basically all ambient light to see the picture (in particular this means no daytime use unless you want to use it in a basement, bathroom, or with blackout curtains). They have terrible sound, you'll need a plug-in speaker/soundbar if it doesn't have bluetooth, but this is also true of the expensive ones. Strong recommendation that you get one with at least one HDMI port, and I'm not sure if there's a price break around that feature.

It might be fine. I spent a lot of time about 1.5 years ago trying to make this choice, but as it was for outdoor use I finally caved and spent $500 on a refurbished real-bulb (better lumens, will require replacement eventually but I hope LED replacements might catch up?) projector that had been the previous year's hot buy. But you might have exactly the right conditions for the cheaper product to be sufficient.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:16 PM on January 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

I've been watching this market closely for ages - I really want cheap projectors to be a thing, because projectors are great! However, until very very recently when i dug into the actual performance of the cheap chinese ones it was pretty poor. Like "320x240 and super dim" kind of poor. The performance of the ones which have recently started being sold seem to be a bit better - you're still not in HD territory, but you might be able to see some detail. The brightness of the lights is pretty much impossible to judge without being in the room though.

Whatever projector you get, its probably worth doing a sanity check that the power usage matches the expected brightness. An Optoma ML750e LED projector uses about 26W to give 700 lumens output. Any projector that claims less power for more lumens is probably lying.

One thing you might want to consider is getting a used one. At least in the UK if you can settle for 1024x768 there's piles of old projectors on eBay for £100 or so. You have to pay attention to their specs though - there's also 800x600 ones and really, really ancient ones for sale. Lamp life is probably the most important thing to look at after resolution - projectors often only go 2000 hours or so on a bulb.

I ended up buying an Epson 1080p model for about £300 - I used camelcamelcamel to watch it on Amazon and bought it when it was about 40% off. I don't regret it one bit - it's really amazing and bright. 1080p is a huge upgrade even from the 720p one I bought on eBay.
posted by leo_r at 3:15 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

I would be pretty shocked if the brightness ratings on these ultra-cheap projectors were not simply pulled out of a marketing hack's posterior. Just something to bear in mind. Any relation to objective reality is likely to be purely coincidental.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:27 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

That is true, as are stats like refresh rate, which will matter if you want to play games.
posted by Lyn Never at 3:33 PM on January 29, 2019

You mentioned games, which means you have at least a couple of extra requirements beyond the aforementioned resolution, brightness and throw:

Latency is important. How important depends on the game you're playing. If it's Hearthstone, you may be OK. If it's some implementation of the "clicking on heads" genre or some kind of fighting game, you'll likely not be happy.

A related issue is synchronization between sound and video. If you're trying to play games or watch videos, this can be a deal-killer.

Finally, be aware that while plenty of cheap projectors can scale higher resolution inputs down to their native resolution, very few of them have scaling that's actually any good.
posted by sourcequench at 3:35 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

Watching a movie on a cheap ($80) protector right now! As stated above, brightness is a bit low, but in a dark basement on a 120" screen ($25) that appears to just be white spandex, it is fine. It does have a fan, but it isn't overly loud even mounted directly overhead. I think the actual resolution is 480, so you aren't going to want to do any presentations on it. The one I got has HDMI, VGA, and RCA (? Yellow video, red/white audio) inputs, and there is definitely latency added on the HDMI input, so gaming options may be limited. You definitely want external speakers.

Our first use was watching a movie in a hotel room just on the wall with the built in speaker, and the kids had no complaints. The more permanent set up in the basement with a screen and surround speakers is great for family movie night.

Set your expectations appropriately and they aren't too bad. Low resolution, not super bright, limited focus and keystone correction, etc. But adequate to get a big picture for fun. I have no regrets with ours.
posted by hankscorpio83 at 4:19 PM on January 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

I have a garbage home projector I bought to decide if I wanted a more expensive projector. It’s about $100. It does have to be between me and the wall, but I bought a cool stand from Amazon and I live in an apartment with limited space so it’s just as well. We started out only watching “shitty” movies on it (ahem, Over the Top) so we wouldn’t feel like we were missing out on great cinematography but we have slowly but surely just started watching whatever anyway and not really noticing much or caring, even though the quality is obviously like an old television.
posted by stoneandstar at 4:29 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

I have a projector that was $89 from RCA (which apparently still exists as a company - who knew?). The picture isn't great, but for my bedroom wall with Netflix or Hulu or PS3 it is just fine. I usually have my contacts out to go to sleep anyway, so image quality isn't a big deal.

I say give one a shot.
posted by tacodave at 4:59 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

Before you buy a cheap projector I'd shop around and see if you can get a nicer used projector. I have a 720p projector that I got very cheap when an office decided everything must! be! 1080p! and it's great for movies.

The bulbs in projectors tend to get dim over time before they burn out completely, but in a darkened room for movie watching you can squeeze a lot of life out of a projector even when it's gotten annoyingly dim for viewing Powerpoints in a normally-lit conference room. And for some projectors you can get cheap replacement bulbs on eBay.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:41 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

We bought a cheap one off amazon for $150 and it lasted... 3 movies.
posted by slateyness at 8:33 PM on January 29, 2019

… from RCA (which apparently still exists as a company - who knew?)

Complete aside: they don't, at least not the consumer electronics division. The RCA brand for that side of things was sold to Technicolor (the French Multinational Formerly Known As Thomson), who licence the RCA name to various 3rd parties.

I think the licencee in the USA is Voxx, who themselves specialise in buying up once-good brand names & milking them to death. In other parts of the world, RCA is usually re-branded TCL or ELI gear.
posted by Pinback at 8:42 PM on January 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

TCL TVs show up under the RCA mark in American markets too.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:54 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I bought this one for my son for Christmas.

He's in college, and happy with it. Plugged in a firestick and watches movies with friends. Speakers are horrible, so he plugged in external speakers. Needs to be in dim light or darkness, else it's washed out, but hey - it's $60. And works.
posted by rich at 9:29 AM on January 30, 2019

I highly recommend doing some research on Projector Central, a go-to source for reviews, tech specs, comparisons, throw distance calculations, color balance analysis, and so much more. I've done several projector purchases based on their data.

Re: dirt cheap projector - probably good for board room presentations and short throw distances, but likely has terribly latency for gaming and crud color, and sub-1080 resolutions will lead to a real muddy image. You can actually get a fairly solid 1080 projector for around 500 bucks now, and there are even some excellent 4k options that are hitting the 1000-1200 buck mark these days as well. A good projector is worth the extra stretch, and Optoma is pretty reliable!
posted by FatherDagon at 12:13 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I bought a CiBest GP90 almost two years ago because it was the best-rated projector for ~$150 when my last tv broke and it's still going strong. It's not true 1080 and its fan is not the quietest, but it's been perfect for projecting streaming movies from my laptop onto my living room wall. (I don't use its sound, so I don't really have an opinion there.) I've had no complaints; it struggles with dark scenes but has no other serious flaws. I have friends over for movie nights semi-regularly, and would probably replace it with a duplicate were it to break tomorrow. It's by no means perfect, but all of the flaws it's had were ones I expected from a cheapo projector and not dealbreakers. It sounds like you don't have unreasonable hopes, so it seems like a sensible thing to try before committing (or continuing to not commit) to a $600 projector.
posted by lhputtgrass at 1:08 PM on January 30, 2019

I bought a garbage one for $100 and it was great fun. The speaker in it was crap, but it was sort of like being at a drive in. I still enjoyed seeing the picture ultra large on my bedroom wall.
posted by xammerboy at 9:01 PM on January 30, 2019

Best answer: Hi! I'm a certified fancy electronic trash enthusiast, and I personally own and have tested a bunch of these. And by 'these' I mean small, LED/DLP/LCD/laser pico and mini projectors, with native resolutions anywhere from 320x180 up to 1920x1080, brightness levels somewhere between 15 and 600 ANSI lumens, some with built-in batteries, and some with built-in "smart" features. I also have professional experience with the ~$600 ones, the ~$1200 ones, and the ~$4000 ones.

Unfortunately, you're correct in assuming that most of the stuff found online from such, uh, well-known manufacturers as APEMAN and Vankyo and GooDee and Crenova, &c., costing between $70 and $100 (a bunch of which look like they rolled off the same assembly line and have only minor cosmetic differences) are... not great. This is not to say that they're all total garbage, but this class of projector is basically the "toy" class; they're almost universally advertised as "1080p compatible" but actually have 800x480 native displays—closer to DVD resolution than 720p, let alone 1080p—along with mediocre optics, uneven brightness and focus, bad or no keystone adjustment, crummy-looking downscaling, horrible onboard audio, loud and annoying cooling fans, and advertising a mostly made-up "lux" or "lumen" rating anywhere from 1000 to 3000 that usually translate to something between 35 and 200 ANSI lumens, putting them squarely in "use in a very dark room only" territory (seriously, anything under 200 lumens projecting an image at over 35" diagonally is pretty much unwatchable during daylight hours, even with blackout curtains, and don't expect to get a vivid image any larger than about 50-60", even in a fully-darkened room). These things can be a lot of fun, assuming you adjust your expectations downward and know what you're getting into, but I wouldn't recommend one for everyday use. Quality control on the no-name ones can be really hit-or-miss, so if you go this route, make sure you source one from somewhere with a good return policy.

The next tier up is the $100-$150 stuff, and it's a real mixed bag. Crucially, this is the price point at which as of the last few years you start to see native 720p/1280x768/WXGA displays, along with real-world brightness between 200-500 lumens, which is enough to start projecting things at the wall-sized 70-120" (in a fully-darkened room, natch) that people are usually imagining of when they think about projecting stuff. This is mostly up-spec'ed versions of the no-name stuff, with the same mixed-bag QA and a slightly smaller subset of the annoyances listed above. $150-$200 is the same as above, but with marginally better QA and build quality, as well as where you start to see projectors with features like wifi and miracast, sometimes running some version of Android on the equivalent SOC guts of a $40 TV box.

$200-$600 is where you'll find the reputable manufacturers' projectors with specs roughly equivalent to (or better than) the no-name $100-$200 projectors, but with almost universally higher build- and image-quality... and here's the thing: these can be found on the used market pretty regularly for between $75-$150 these days, and honestly, for most people I'd recommend going this route; you're more likely to be able to find actual reviews, aftermarket replacement parts like remote controls, etc.

If you have any questions about specific brands or models, feel free to ask, and I'll let you know if I have any experience with them.
posted by drumcorpse at 10:49 PM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]