Recommended Portable Projectors

If you have your heart set on something small that you can throw in a backpack, the TCL PlayCube is the only one that I would call a “complete package.” It has decent brightness, good speakers, a useful aiming system, and lasts about an hour and a half on maximum brightness using its built-in battery. Overall, it just feels sturdy and well built.

If you’re looking for something rugged to take with you while you travel or bring into the backyard, the Nebula Mars 3 is going to get my recommendation for the third year in a row. It’s got a huge built-in battery, great speakers, and is twice as bright as the TCL PlayCube with a full two hours of playback on its built-in battery. It’s also a great Bluetooth speaker. I’ve been bringing the Nebula Mars 3 on my camping trips for the last two years and I’ll continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The NexiGo Nova Mini was bright, for a portable projector, had good contrast, for a portable projector, and had the best picture quality of these portable projectors. It’s currently on sale for $599, which is a reasonable price for this level of performance but while I appreciate that it maintained 100% of its brightness on battery and that the dynamic dimming system made it considerably more efficient, the speakers are not great, which seems like a big miss for a portable system. It seems like the Nova Mini would be better suited for a semi-permanent setup with a separate speaker system, which actually based on NexiGo’s marketing might have been its intended use case anyways. Aside from used and discontinued projectors, the Nova Mini is probably the best projector performance you can currently get around that $600 price point.

The Epson LifeStudio Flex Plus seems the best fit for that use case. It had good brightness, decent picture quality, good speakers, an easy to use aiming system, and impressively low input lag when using keystone. But the thing that qualified it to be in this video, which is its ability to be powered by a USB-C power bank was extremely disappointing since it loses over half of its brightness when powered by USB-C. Ultimately the LifeStudio Flex Plus is less of a portable projector and more of a mini projector like the JMGO N1S 4K and Hisense M2 Pro, so I’m also going to include it in my next video with those other sub $1500 projectors to see if it can compete.