Excellent value for money, science fiction come to life.
110 Lumens is enough light to project an attractive image with some ambient light in the background, although in pitch darkness the image is very attractive, with decent black levels and very saturated color. XGA resolution is more than acceptable for me since I really only have room for a 70 inch screen. It loses a third of a star for it needing large image files to be resized to XGA (simple enough, really)so that they'll display properly if they're in a portrait orientation. The M1 did this perfectly, why can't the M2? It loses another third of star for having too small a remote with fiddly buttons. In fact, the remote is a pain in the rear to use! This unit still blows away older LCD models I've used in the past that cost thousands of dollars.
It may not be 720p, but I've found XGA to have less wasted display area for the majority of my slide collection. If you're fan of classics (film and TV) prior to widescreen, XGA 4:3 is actually a bonus, since screens for that are cheaper and take less space. For 16:9 material it's still 1024x576, which is still close to double the resolution you'll get from SVGA projectors for 16:9. To break it down, 720p has 921,600 pixels, XGA, 786,432, and SVGA, 480,000. It's less of a jump from XGA to 720p than it is from SVGA to XGA.
It has, however, played all the video files I've thrown at it, and right off a 1TB USB hard drive at that. It's also worked perfectly with my all my SD cards(except a 32GB which is over the 16GB limit anyway) and all my flash drives. It will play music for any slide show of pictures you start, as well. I normally use it with my WD TV Live Plus, though, as the HDMI input was part of the attraction. Audio output through it's headphone jack is very clean, too, and handy for use with HDMI since it's absurd to expect much of the internal speakers.
The last third of a star it loses is for how tricky the menu system is to navigate, and how poorly documented. You get used to it, though, but it can be a chore. On the plus side though, there are plenty of options available for tweaking the image. Specifically, it has controls for Sharpness, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Color Temperature, Color Balance(for red, green and blue individually), Keystone, Up/Down/left/right for ceiling mounting and rear projection.
Proper auto rotate, which the M1 does perfectly, a proper manual, and a decent remote, would have bumped it up to five stars taking into consideration the fact that you can get it used and LED technology is almost bullet proof. It's even smaller than it look in pictures, and so fits nicely on a tripod, which is crucial if you're faced with space constraints like I am. All in all, good value for money!Read full review
