Capsule 3 Laser

I have a different take on that. Nothing beats a TV at comparable costs. I have a 75 inch TV in my living room and that’s the best quality I can get at a price of 2.000 bucks (incl a soundbar) Since I wanted something small for my bedroom that I could angle to the ceiling I bought the JMGO Picoplay at a discount. Not even close to my TV quality-wise but super nice from a convenience and footprint POV. Since I’m traveling a lot and I hate most Hotel TVs I bought the Anker capsule 3 (again at a discount) too and imho that’s the smallest truly portable projector out there with a decent picture quality. Long story short, for 650 bucks altogether I have 2 small projectors that suit my needs but cannot compete with my TV when it comes to picture or sound quality. I you want the best quality, get a TV. If you want to be flexible go for a projector or get both if your budget allows it.

Portable projectors are generally super limited. Brightness is ass due to low power design, which is a must as you're sacrificing a big light engine for portability. But for general vacation use, all three projectors you're contemplating are quite okay. I'd probably go with the Nebula Capsule 3 Laser primarily because laser light sources can be brighter at lower power use (meaning you don't need a complete blackout room). Plus you get Android TV with relatively good support, whereas Samsung has a tendency of forgetting about their Tizen devices that aren't the best selling mainline product...

I am absolutely no expert at this, but I recently decided we needed a projector and screen in our cabin for outdoor movie watching in the summer evenings. First I bought a 1000 projector and when it arrived I never opened the box, I just decided that was too much to spend on a first time try at this. I sent it back. After a lot of research I bought a nebula capsule series 3 projector and a aajk 150 inch screen that I strung up across our 7 x 14 garage door on our Detached garage. I am absolutely amazed at how well it worked. Couldn’t be happier. The screen was $28, some bungee cords and some eye hooks for five dollars. The projector was 399+ about another $25 for a case. I had a tripod already to put it on. The sky wasn’t 100% dark yet and the back patio light was on at the back of the cabin, but I put a baseball game up and was just amazed at how good the picture and sound were. Before I took it up to the cabin this weekend, last week, I was having to give a PowerPoint presentation in a conference room and the TV in the room was broken so I went ahead and took it in there and projected it up on a kind of dark gray wall, and it worked great in that room with the fluorescent lights on as well. https://preview.redd.it/emfnta45e77f1.jpeg?width=3347&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7aac91b74c78bde108928cd982e6ecd0f75f9ea4

# Context Since I recently relocated countries and I'm starting from scratch, I've been wondering whether getting a TV or projector would be best. As I wasn't sure I was ready to commit to either a large TV or an expensive permanent projector since we're renting at the moment and plans change. # The Decision We were quite close to buying a cheap TV until I realized our current apartment complex has "TULU" dispensers that allow us to rent appliances for "free" (up to an hour) and we tried & quite liked the Anker Nebula 3 Capsule. Sure, it wasn't very bright (it's barely bright enough for night usage) but it was plenty usable and awfully convenient because the integrated battery + speakers + google TV + auto keystone correction meant it was ready to use within seconds literally ANYWHERE. My wife absolutely fell in love with the concept. Besides, where I live its going dark at 4pm ATM so that's a lot of "dark" time for using it, and we could use it on the bedroom earlier closing the blackout curtains. Sadly, at 500-600 EUR average price where I live for either the regular Nebula 3 or Nebula 3 Laser was a larger investment than I'd like. Even if I was leaning for regular Nebula due to horrendous Chromatic Aberration reports on cheap Laser projectors. But hey, maybe the convenience was worth it? Even if every post on r/budgetprojectors and r/projectors acted like its brightness was "unusable" or "an insult for the price" while screaming I just get the Nexigo PJ40/JMGO N1S/BenQ. But not only did some of them feel too large for me, I wasn't sure I wanted to commit to a "permanent" type bulkier projector that required being constantly plugged in for use (+investing in separate stand). Anyways, just as I was about to pull the trigger on the Nebula 3, I stumbled upon some recommendations of the XGIMI Mogo 2 Pro which seemed awfully similar to what I wanted, but even brighter? No integrated battery though, but its USB C charging + integrated stand still felt miles more convenient than other projectors and even the Nebula 3. Thankfully, the Mogo 2 Pro was out of stock before I could buy it, and Amazon only had the Mogo 4 w/Additional Battery Stand for 500 EUR which addressed multiple of my concerns (integrated battery/full size HDMI port/Google TV) and even added some amazing features I never knew I wanted like being able to use it as a bluetooth speaker or a stand giving it incredible battery life. # The Product Honestly, we had high expectations from people raving about how much brighter it was than the nebula, but it absolutely exceeded our expectations. We bought this fully expecting to be restricted for using it in the dark and extremely restricting conditions (Nebula 3 was barely visible at night if a single light was on). But to our shock, it actually works during day! And in WAY more challenging conditions I expected it to fail at. As shown in the image, we used it at 10am in broad daylight (enough to cast shadows outside) on a wall right beside a huge window. And while it did help a bit the window is on the shaded side of the building, it still felt extremely impressive for the price AND small + battery powered form factor. Specially when the Nebula 3 suffered under dramatically more forgiving conditions. It's so bright we actually use it on ECO mode at times lol. Brightness for me is a solid 9/10 when you account for the size/price. Speaker quality was similarly way more solid than I was expecting. For the size, price and power, I certainly did NOT expect Homepod or Bose level sound quality, but I was crossing my fingers it was not bad enough to be unusable. Thankfully, sound is frankly excellent, with deep enough bass and loud full volume for movies/games to be enjoyable at home (we use only 30-40% of its volume). I'd rate it 8/10. Not mind blowing, but absolutely WAY better than most people would expect from something this small that packs this much internals while having room for a giant battery. As for battery life, even if it was something we expected, it still surprised us. By its own, battery life felt more than acceptable at \~2 hours average. Maybe 15-20 mins more on ECO mode, and a tad less on Standard Mode but always enough to finish a single movie. But the stand with integrated battery life? Not only does it easily DOUBLE that (definitely not "triple" it like XGIMI claims, but definitely maybe 2.5x easily), we did NOT expect how convenient it would be to use. Its trivially easy to connect/disconnect instantly as well as to disassemble for travel and how many more convenient positions it opened up. I'd rate battery life 10/10 with the powered stand, or at 8/10 without it. Given how much brighter it is than the Nebula, I expected battery life to suffer and be much worse. Thankfully that does NOT seem to be the case. Besides, we love it's USB C powered as I can use any of our power banks for unlimited use anywhere. And as a final cool thing I noticed, processing power felt WAY better than expected. I'm very used to TV's (even expensive ones) and even Streaming Boxes having horribly underpowered processors forcing me to always just use a Nvidia Shield. (Admittedly, I have low tolerance for lag) But it was a lovely surprise seeing how snappy the Mogo 4 is. It might be far from my Shield power-wise (then again, what isn't?), but its plenty snappy for regular use and navigating the UI is very snappy with very low delays. With the caveat that trying to open the settings menu while streaming HDR content can sometimes cause some slow down, but that's a common issue on most devices and easy to work around. I'd rate performance a solid 8/10. # Random things I noticed Before I end the review, I'd like to note 2 things which stuck to me. The 360 Swivel stand is FANTASTIC and crazy convenient as it means its ridiculously easy to set up anywhere on any angle imaginable. Even projecting on the ceiling while in bed is now something we can do and always wanted to. And as a bonus, I love how when collapsed it protects the lens. It also supports ambient light mode and some weird lens for "mood light" usage, but I've yet to find a use for those but maybe something will change. For now they remain gimmicks for me. Finally, power consumption appears to be 35-50watts during normal operation. Which is... ok? I guess it makes sense for how bright it is when you account for the speakers and processor running Google TV. But I'd like if I didn't wish it consumed slightly less at maybe 20-30watts. Our 20,000mah USB C PD power banks last \~2-3 hours. Would have been quite nice if it lasted 3-4 hours per charge. But its not like its an issue as our power banks can fully charge in 30-45 minutes and we can just cycle them. We use it fully plugged in sometimes too, but the convenience of being battery powered cannot be beat. Its kind of crazy to me still something this small and bright with single 20k power bank gives me nearly 8 hours of movie time. # In Conclusion I would 100% recommend this projector to anyone as it felt like a huge surprise even after all the research we did before getting it. Hope this review helps other as well. The only scenarios I might not recommend it is perhaps for permanent setups where a brighter display would be preferable. But for convenience sake and people on a similar situation? This can't be beat. And even if you think you might not need this level of convenience? Maybe you do, but not having the options could have always been the limiting factor like it was for us. Also, happy new year!

Man, I wish I didn't want mine for games or I'd have gotten that one too. Colors and contrast look fantastic on the laser version, I'm jealous of you. Only reason I avoided the laser version is it seems cheap laser projectors like the Mogo 4 Laser tend to have [color fringing from chromatic aberration](https://www.reddit.com/r/xgimi/comments/1lfls0k/mogo_4_laser_pixelblurry) around text or light borders of things which are a lot more present for games than movies. I know some people don't mind it, but I do if the effect is too pronounced or obvious like in this case.

Lol, fair enough! Seems like a perfect device for your use case given circumstances. It might also be just me being a bit less tolerant of things like that. My wife for example can't tell difference between 60 and 120hz or 4k to 1080p and I hate how much I can ruin things for myself for having preferences on displays. The thing is, I don't mind low resolution or even low refresh rate (even 30fps) depending on type of content and display type/size. But color fringing is too distracting for me as I've suffered from it on some display types including VR headsets with fresnel lenses and their large amounts of chromatic aberration. Worst part is I didn't notice it at first for quite a while, but once I did it was impossible to unsee it for me or forget it exists :(

Sidenote I forgot to mention, I intentionally avoided the "performance mode" for maximum brightness. Brightest mode I use is "standard" as that's plenty bright for me while remaining near absolute silent. I LOVE how quiet it is. It never dawned on me to mention fan noise in the review since I literally never noticed it even though we always use low volume. The one time I used performance mode the fan became obnoxiously loud and brightness didn't feel like it went up dramatically to justify it which to me is perfect anyways. Oh, and we've used it a lot to play games! Works with our Switch 1/2 and my MSI Claw 8AI+ (Windows PC handheld) with near zero latency even in FPS and online games. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll be happy to answer them!

The nebula capsule 3 has a gaming mode that works well and is about 50,000 on sale. We use it for camping but it does the trick when needed.

Nah, the Anker capsule 3 for about 50k is enough for a solid 60" screen.

Anker Nebula Capsule 3.0: have two of them, amazing product.

Nebula Capsule is worth every penny for a first proper projector, portable and the picture quality is actually solid. if that's a bit much budget wise the Dangbei Atom is a cheaper alternative that still does the job well

I was just in that boat, I wanted something compact as well though, got a nebula capsule and am really happy. (Keep in mind your budget for a good screen, so you might want to opt for a used capsule 2 if you want to keep total budget low)