10 Best Portable Projectors for Indoor and Outdoor Movie Marathons, Plus Prime Day Deals
The last thing you want is to get a mini projector and not be able to see the movie in the sun’s glare or see your battery drain before you’ve got through your Star Wars marathon. Here are the key things to keep in mind before you buy:If you plan on taking it outside, you’ll need to get a projector that can show off the goods when there’s some light outside, or at least with the curtains open.
if you’re making these garden parties a regular thing. Otherwise, you’ll need a flat white surface like a sheet to watch on.You can’t always set up your projector opposite the wall – it’ll sometimes have a bit of an angle, and that’s where the magic of keystone correction comes in. The projected picture will be distorted if your angle isn’t perfect, but this correction fixes your skewed projection and makes it rectangular without you having to move your projector.
A few projectors come with smart features like voice control or a dedicated app to help you browse what to watch or change the volume. When it comes to assistants, you’re likely to find Alexa and Google Assistant, and you might also notice extra stuff like Chromecast, Bluetooth connectivity, and USB and HDMI ports to plug in flash drives, games consoles, or laptops.
However, if you insist on projecting in the daytime, you'll need a minimum of 2,500 lumens to even make your image appear, and much more than that to see it clearly. And we’re talking about inside the house or ambient sunlight here. As mentioned above, there aren’t any projectors on the market that can beat the sun, so if you have dreams of projecting in broad daylight somewhere away from the shade, you can give up on those now. There’s a reason why outdoor cinema events happen after dark.
The main thing to note is that a lot of these brands often won’t use the industry-standard brightness specifications for their listings, which is ANSI lumens. ANSI is short for the American National Standards Institute, and its brightness specs are the respected source for evaluating light source strength. A candle is 14 lumens, a light bulb is 1600 lumens, and so on.