Recommended Projectors Under $100

If your budget is $100, the Fudoni is the clear winner. It’s the brightest, has the best picture quality, acceptable input lag for casual gaming, it has motorized focus, a 1080p native display, decent speakers, digital keystone, and HDMI CEC support for controlling your streaming stick with the Fudoni remote. Overall, the Fudoni was the only projector that didn’t disappoint me in some way.

I was fully ready to give my recommendation to the HY320 Mini that finished 3rd in overall picture quality, has a nice small form factor, a mildly usable smart operating system, and puts out almost 200 lumens for just $26.49, which is almost unbelievably cheap. But as of writing this script it’s already unavailable just 10 days after I bought it. Now, the good news is that Umbolite is just a reseller and the HY320 Mini is actually made by Magcubic so it should have other sellers, but I don’t think you should pay more than around $40 for it.

The Happrun H1 did well enough to earn my recommendation again in 2025, but I don’t think it’s worth the $76 that it’s currently selling for, and I think it’s more fairly priced in the $50-60 range. But as you can see from my price tracker, it’s only been under $70 one time since July 2025.

The Zentality has all of Android 13’s picture options available that let you adjust things like gamma and white balance, and it also has better speakers and a fairly quiet fan. But it’s got relatively poor focus, a 720p native display, and some annoying bugs like the fact that it doesn’t play any sound through its speakers unless you go into the FireTV settings and set sound to PCM output instead of Auto, but I still think it’s a decent value at $70-80 if you want to try and make the built-in Android operating system work.

**Not recently offered under $100** If you want the brightest option under $100, that’s the Groview JQ818C which is over two times brighter than the next brightest projector and consequently finished first in the side-by-side testing. The Groview also had the loudest speakers and acceptable input lag numbers for gaming. But all that brightness comes at a cost, because the fan is louder than most at 48.4 decibels and the Groview is roughly three times as big and uses 3x as much power as the rest of the projectors in the video. Still, almost 500 ANSI lumens for $99 is pretty incredible.