This little projector has everything you need: good picture, great sound, the ability to cast from your phone, and HDMI inputs to connect other devices such as a gaming console. If you want to level-up your couch potato game and watch movies while fully reclined or lying on your back staring at the ceiling, well, this is it. Why bother sitting up straight watching a normal TV when you can lay completely down and watch a movie on a 160inch picture on your ceiling? It's great and you maximize your ultimate inner lazy.
This projector is housed in it's own stand, so there is no need for a tripod and you can even rotate it completely vertical. This makes it easy to setup and not have to bother setting perfect angles all of the time and messing with tripod settings. The projector uses the Google Home system and I'll be frank, I've never used Google Home before. I needed to download the Google Home app and the setup on the projector walked me through setting up everything. Google Home is quite extensive and I don't really use much of the features outside of streaming channels but there is a lot to it. You can setup a screen saver, use your own pictures as a screen saver, use AI generated images to display, set up different device locations – it was a bit much for me, but once I was taken to a screen where I could add channels, everything else was a breeze and you can disregard everything else. I was able to add Hulu, Disneyplus, Crunchyroll, MAX, Netflix, Youtube, etc, pretty much everything. Setup took about 10-15 minutes as the projector goes through this "setting up" phase and once that was completed, we were in business. Turning the projector on from a shut off state will take you to screen where different shows from all of your channels are displayed, things you have previously watched, recommendations, and channel lists. Lovely.
The setup menu is quite extensive and I spent quite a bit of time optimizing everything to my liking. That said, here are some tips for those that which to project onto the ceiling. I have the projector far enough to display a 160inch screen. but first things first, you need to fix the focus and keystone settings. There are automatic settings for this, but I got much better results just manually doing it myself. For sound, I have it set to Movie Mode which I found to be the most enjoyable. The speakers are quite good (phenomenal really) in a bedroom but in a large living room you may want to hook up a separate speaker system suitable for Home Theater. There are 3 different backlight settings: ECO, Standard, and Vivid. I suggest using ECO or Standard as the fan does get louder the higher you go. I use ECO myself as in a dark or dim room, the difference between Standard and ECO isn't much but the fan is much more quiet.
As for picture settings, there are some things to consider. HDR streams and non-HDR streams are independent of each other, so you can use different settings between the two. However, HDR washes out the color of the picture and encourages you to turn up the brightness and color settings out of what is normal. I did not want to do this, so I turned off HDR on HDR streams.
As for my settings:
Auto Brightness: Off, I want stability and I don't like the fan getting loud
Brightness: 49
Contrast: 53
Saturation: 66 (needed because I am projecting onto a ceiling, which is not pure white and not a "projector screen"
HUE: 0
Sharpness: 12
Advanced Settings
Color Temperature: Warm most of the time, if you're watching in the middle of the afternoon then Standard
DNR: Off
MPEG NR: Off
Max Vivid: Off
Adaptive Luma Control: Low or Off (I prefer low as it helps with black crush, or low lit scenes. Also it improves the picture most of the time but keep in mind this can sometimes cause skin tones to appear more yellow or red.)
Local Contrast Control: Off
Flesh Tone: Off
DI Film Mode: Off (This disables a lot of the post-processing "enhancements"
Blue Stretch: On (This compensates for for the lifted Saturation value)
Low Blue Light: Off
As you can see from the photos, picture is fantastic. If you want to watch stuff on the ceiling like me, this is it.
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