Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This projector is excellent for the price. I paid $99. (A $20 coupon was available for some reason which brought it down to $99 from $119) For night-time viewing with no grand expectations you will be pleased. It got a genuine "wow" from the wife and kids. They've watched a few hours on it so far with delight. We have an Apple TV plugged into it. NOTE If you are the kind of person that will fret over non-premium features then you may need to step up to something at least 6x the price (but ideally >20x the price) to avoid triggering your nerves. This is a fantastic budget buy... don't buy it with the wrong expectations. SOUND: Like other reviewers I expected garbage sound quality from the internal speaker and was therefore surprised that it was similar to a half-decent little portable USB speaker. I plan to use external speakers but the internal one didn't get any negative comments from the initial audience (of undiscerning family members) which is a pleasant bonus. Great to just be able to throw up a movie with almost zero setup. FOCUS & KEYSTONE: It has a mechanical keystone. You shift a roller and it presumably tilts one of the lenses inside (probably all-plastic internal components made with the kind of manufacturing tolerances you'd expect at this price point). On the plus side, this mechanical keystone means you can quickly straighten up the image on the wall +/- 15 degrees. However, you will discover that the image cannot be uniformly focused when keystone is being used. If you use keystone you will have to focus the center of the image and tolerate some focus imperfection at the top and bottom of the frame. The focus is also a mechanical roller. Even at a perfectly level projection angle (i.e. no keystone, where the bottom of the projected image is precisely in line with the lens of the projector) you may need to tolerate some minor focus imperfections. I don't use any keystone on mine and the extremities are less crisp than the rest of the image. I can notice it when projecting text (e.g. the text at the top-right of the Netflix interface) but it is minor and doesn't impair the experience watching tv/movies. When I pointed it out to my wife she didn't care. Nobody cares. If you buy this expecting optics developed in a Swiss engineering lab with professional grade tolerances you should probably take another look at the price... it's not than kind of product. THROW SIZE: There is no mechanical zoom. We have it mounted on a wall in a room that is 11 feet to the opposite wall (i.e. the *back* of the projector is 11 feet from the projection wall). At this distance our image has a diagonal of ~106 inches. There is a digital "zoom" function in the menus that let you reduce the picture size... probably at the cost of some fidelity. Good to have that feature in a pinch but we aren't using it. BRIGHTNESS: At 11 feet out the brightness is decent for watching at night. That is all that we want it for. Again, the wife and kids were stoked. You will probably not want to use it with the lights on (washes it out) and certainly not in any daylight, so don't buy it to replace an all-purpose TV. Also, don't try to make side-by-side comparisons with your LCD/LED/OLED TV... contrast in dark scenes will be far inferior and brightness in general will be far less uniform. If you project an entirely "black" screen you will see a range of slightly lighter and darker areas. Again, nobody in my house noticed or cared and I was happy to count the money I saved. To get a projector that will work with lots of ambient light and produce a very uniform brightness you really need to jump a long way up the price ladder. What you get out of this projector is very solid for the money. MANUAL & ACCESSORIES: I haven't tried out the included basic projection screen. It's a soft fabric with eight metal eyelets around it (one in each corner and one half-way along each side). They ship it with 8 plastic hooks and 8 tabs of double-sided tape so you can mount it on a wall without drilling. It has a black outer border. Seems fine. Nice touch including it... adds to the crazy good value of this product. The remote is fine (uses 2x AAA). They include all the cables you need: VGA, HDMI, power (US style). They all work. The included manual is clear and covers most of what you might want to know. TMY invites you to contact them by email for support. I haven't needed to do that yet so I can't say how responsive they are. OTHER COMMENTS Fan noise is comparable to other projectors of this size (in my experience) and so is no cause for special praise or complaint. We're happy with it. I can't comment on the color fidelity etc. because I'm somewhat color blind. All I can say is, you see vibrant colors, there is some image configurability in the menus and nobody had anything bad to say about the colors. I'm sure if you started testing it's color space you'd find all kinds of limitations but... again... nobody cares. I've asked my teenage son what he thought of the color just now and his answer was "I don't think any of us have any problem with the projector dad. It's great." TMY *are* incentivizing reviews on Amazon by offering a gift. There is a little insert card in the box along with the manual. It says "Happy with this purchase: 1. Share your experience by leaving an honest Review" and then it shows a picture of five stars. So I guess they are not specifically asking people to leave a five star review to get a reward but they are hinting at it pretty strongly. They also say "Not happy with this purchase: 1. Please give us a chance before you leave a 1-3 star review on Amazon or return the product" and then they ask you to please contact them directly to get a solution/replacement/refund etc. I think it's kind'a fair enough? Not much different to what hotels do to try getting their online reviews up. I'd decided to leave a review before I saw this card... I mention it in case people reading the reviews would like to know of potential influence. I have only had the projector a couple of days so I can't comment on longevity. They do claim to offer a 3 year warranty. I will update my review if it bombs out though. SUMMARY It works and it's mind-bending value. How can you produce something like this profitably for $99 let alone ship it and let Amazon take their cut? Taking the family out for dinner and movie (back when that was allowed) would easily consume that amount of cash. I just hope it lasts. Very happy so far.