Micro projector (micro projector) refers to a projector product with a weight of less than 1.75kg. Unlike traditional projectors that use 3-chip LCDs as imaging components, they mainly use DLP technology to balance portability and projection performance. They specialize in business presentations and home audio and video.
The intelligent micro investment mainly refers to the product that changes the original embedded system to Android system. With the addition of Android system, projectors can work independently of computers and other devices, which is more suitable for business travel and family users. They also use slogans such as "no screen TV, second killing tablet TV".
But what is the actual performance of intelligent micro investment? Is it worth buying? In order to clarify these two problems, this horizontal review selects four smart micro investment models with high attention for horizontal comparison, which are ZECO/Zhige CX6, Jimi Z2, Nut A3, and Shanshui X6.
Very similar hardware configuration
Their configuration basically represents the current mainstream household micro projection level: the DLP display chip of Texas Instruments is equipped with LED light source, 30-60W power, 30000 hours of bulb life, about 1000 lumens of brightness, about 1000:1 of contrast, with 3D display, less than 1kg of weight, 1.3 left to right zoom ratio, etc.
The following table shows the most obvious differences between them: body shape, weight and price. Among them, ZECO and Shanshui are traditional projector manufacturers with high product prices; While Jimi and Nuts are new entrants, and their pricing and sales methods (go to the official website or Jingdong to buy them) are similar to Xiaomi. The prices of four products range from 2000 to 6000 yuan.
[Appearance and accessories]
[ZECO CX6, good appearance, luxury accessories]
It has the highest price and the most luxurious accessories among the four. In addition to the subwoofer and bar speaker in the independent sound part, the projector body and small accessories are separately packed in two boxes.
The machine shape is the most traditional of the four, which is more in line with the public taste. The antenna on the back suggests that it has wifi function
The right side of the fuselage is a focusing lever and a heat sink. However, the virtual position of the zoom lever is large, and Ni Uneven. Because the closer the projection distance is, the higher the precision of focusing is required, so if the projection distance is closer, the focusing process will be more painful.
The large area heat dissipation grille on the front and left side of the machine has been made into Tuhao gold.
The use warning message is printed on the top of the machine with light finish.
The middle of the bottom is a heat dissipation grille, and the bottom is an opening for a built-in horn.
In fact, the lens only occupies a part of the "lens barrel". Its outer ring is decorated with two concentric circles of black and silver, which can just jam the dust cover of the lens.
There are HDMI, VGA, OTG, TF card slot, 5.1 audio output port, traditional TV's tricolor cable interface (attached adapter cable), and two USB ports on the back. In addition, it is the only one of my four products that uses traditional switches and provides independent power indicator lights.
The shape and shape of the remote control are in line, providing signal source switching; Direction control and Android 3 diamond keys; Ladder correction, 2/3D switching and other display tuning shortcut buttons.
Although the thickness of the machine is large, the length and width are well controlled, which is relatively harmonious compared with the 5-inch mobile phone.
The machine needs to be powered by an independent power adapter, which is produced by Hangjia and is one circle smaller than the laptop. The limit power of the machine can be calculated from the label as 65W, which is only a little higher than the ordinary lamp.
The subwoofer is larger in size, as shown above with the attached independent sound system.
The audio has its own remote control, and the subwoofer has a volume knob on the top
The subwoofer uses a two pin plug, which provides the AUX socket and is responsible for supplying power to the speakers. Its rated power is 180W.
The speaker part is really long, and the 5.1 inch screen mobile phone will be defeated immediately.
The side of the horn is smooth metal.
There is no button or switch on the body only Nameplate and power audio signal connection line. Its power is 60W, reactance resistance is 4 Ω, and sensitivity is 75dB.
There are four such loudspeakers in the huge horn.
The interior protection of the accessory case is very good.
Inside are two 3D glasses, the attached 8G U disk, glasses charging cable and HDMI cable (the length of the cable is really short).
3D glasses are shutter type.
The top of the glasses is the charging interface, switch and indicator light.
Open the 3D mode of the projector as shown above.
The effect of seeing through glasses is as above. The glasses are light and comfortable to wear, but the shutter of the glasses flickers obviously, which is not suitable for wearing for a long time.
The effect of the whole assembly is more luxurious.
[Jimi Z2, low-key and solid]
The appearance of Jimi is more square. If it covers the front camera, it is similar to the router in shape and size.
The top of the machine is a translucent white back plate, and the side is covered with metal. For heat dissipation, heat dissipation holes are also made on the binding.
There is an English logo printed on the top and an antenna with router on the back.
On the right side of the top is the focus knob, and below is the touch control button (direction key, Android home page and return key). When touching, the backlight will light up.
At the bottom of the machine is a large area of heat dissipation grille, and below the nameplate is a screw hole reserved for tripod head.
The bottom is made of skin like material with good hand feel and fingerprint collection ability. The cooling fan can also be vaguely seen inside the middle cooling net.
The thickness of the body is well controlled, but the lens dust cover is not designed. Pay attention to protecting the lens in daily use.
The right side of the front is still the cooling net.
The back of the fuselage provides three USB interfaces, TF card slots VGA/HDMI、 RJ45 socket, tri color cable and audio output port of the network cable. It is worth mentioning that SPDIF optical fiber audio output interface is also placed on the left side of the network cable port.
The power adapter is directly attached to the Hangjia logo and provides a power on indicator.
The output is 19.5V/3.3A, equivalent to 64.35W.
The remote control of Jimi is the smallest of the four. The direction and volume control keys are matched with the three Android King Kong keys (home page, return, and setting). The keys are fluorescent.
The body shape is also the smallest of the four products, similar to the 7-inch flat panel.
[Nuts A3, round and simple]
The most obvious part of the machine packaging is the mango TV logo in the upper left corner. Its price is 1999, which is the most user-friendly of the four models. The parts can't be forced any more. In the package, except for the body, there are only power lines and remote controls.
The white fuselage is white as a whole, and the side is made of horizontal heat dissipation grids.
The front panel is black, and there are no too many decorations beside the lens, but it is the same as Jimi, and there is no lens dust cover.
On the right side of the front panel is the main heat dissipation grille, where you can see the aluminum alloy heat dissipation plate and the copper heat dissipation tube running through it.
At the rear right side of the fuselage is a rear mesh horn opening.
The top of the fuselage is made of curved smooth material, the left side is the status indicator, the middle is the control button, and the right side is the focusing lever.
The control button in the middle uses a solid button. Although the focusing lever on the right has a large resistance, the damping is balanced and the focusing experience is good.
The bottom of the fuselage is the same as the old one: nameplate, foot pad, and fixing screw hole of the pan tilt. However, the nut provides more complete screw holes for the PTZ.
Because the body is too thin, the interface indicator is printed on the top cover. The machine provides two USB, TF card slot, OTG, HDMI, RJ45 network cable interfaces, ordinary 3.5mm and PDIF audio output interfaces.
It is worth noting that the VGA interface has been cancelled. At the same time, it has a built-in power adapter, which can be directly connected to the power cord. This design is worthy of praise.
The remote control style of nut is similar to that of Jimi, but there are many pictures and media control buttons.
The remote control adopts exaggerated ergonomic design, which makes it feel good.
Although the machine is thin, its size is similar to that of 8-inch and 9-inch flat plates when the area is large.
[Shanshui X6 is traditional and regular]
The machine is really square, and the main color is earth gold. The frosted shell feels good, but it is actually plastic.
On the left side of the fuselage is a gear shaped focusing knob Resistance Ni It is the most moderate of the four machines.
The round lens is enclosed in a square protective frame.
The lens cover can be pulled out to the left. There is no independent lens cover like ZECO, which is easier to take care of.
On the right side of the front panel is a huge heat dissipation net, and you can directly see the double copper tubes inside.
It is the only one of the four machines with interfaces on the left side of the fuselage. On the left is the power supply, full-size tri color cable interface, HDMI and USB interface.
There are control buttons and indicator lights on the top of the fuselage, and the buttons feel hard.
At the bottom, you can see the cooling grille and the openings of the two speakers. There is also a dust-proof net inside, which is more intimate. And even the feet used to adjust the height are also equipped with silicone cushion.
The back of the fuselage is a large mesh opening designed for double speakers, and the interface is still classic VGA, audio, RJ45, etc. It is worth noting that the SD card slot is used instead of the TF card slot, and the reset hole is also provided, which makes the manufacturer feel very traditional.
The design of remote control is more traditional, just like TV and DVD remote control, There is a numeric keyboard on it, The button also has fluorescence. It is convenient to enter the wifi password, but it is basically idle for the rest of the time. It is worth mentioning that its remote control angle limit is the largest of the four, and it is impossible to control an inaccurate projector.
The output of the power adapter is 19V/4.72A, and the extreme power can reach 90W, but the maximum power consumption marked by the machine is only 63W, with a lot of margin.
The cost of large margin power supply is huge volume, and the size of its remote controller and power supply is obviously the largest of the four.
[Portability comparison]
From top to bottom, from left to right, they are ZECO CX6, Shanshui X6, Jimi Z2 and Nut A3. Landscape is the smallest in horizontal width, and nut is the thinnest (but it is the widest), while the smallest in actual sense is Jimi. However, compared with traditional projectors, they are already very small in size.
From left to right are ZECO, Jimi and Shanshui power adapters.
From top to bottom are ZECO, Jimi and Shanshui power adapters. Their weight is proportional to their volume. The heaviest and largest ones are Shanshui, followed by Jimi and ZECO. and Built in power adapter Nut A3, naturally, is the best in this link.
In addition, their power interface is universal, and the power can be turned on normally even when mixed.
From left to right are rice, nuts ZECO、 The remote control of Shanshui and the remote control of Internet manufacturers are obviously smaller and simpler.
[Parameters and power consumption heating]
The above figure only shows the products with missing interfaces. The lack of SPDIF interface in ZECO is not a problem, but the removal of VGA from nuts may cause inconvenience to old display users. Shanshui's design of replacing TF card slot with SD card slot is even more puzzling. Without OTG function, Jimi and Shanshui may cause inconvenience to audio and video users.
All four machines have built-in speakers, but the horn parameters of nuts are unknown. Among them, Shanshui's dual 3W speakers are obviously the best in volume and sound quality, and the other three are not far behind. When ZECO connects its own independent audio, it will kill other competitors without any doubt.
At room temperature of 27 ℃, the temperature is detected after playing the movie for half an hour, and the hottest spot is taken for reading. ZECO is 38.9 degrees, Jimi is 42 degrees, Nuts is 36.4 degrees, Shanshui is 35.7 degrees.
Even for the polar meter with the highest temperature, it is only 42 degrees at the heat sink, and the highest temperature at the panel and side is 38.4 degrees. The 4 models can be used normally without worrying about heating.
[Comparison of system interface and use experience]
The interfaces of the four products are very similar to those of the TV box. The win8 Metro style block content card, the unified top label and the right slide, and even the label content are signboard items of "recommendation, film, and application". However, even such highly homogeneous content can clearly reflect the gap in software skills between manufacturers.
[Jimi Z2 has ordinary functions but smooth experience]
On the top are classic labels such as "recommendation, film and television, games, and local". Content icons and animations are carefully done, and the design of third-party apps directly displayed under the application label is considerate.
Because the functions of traditional projector and TV box are mixed at the same time, intelligent micro projector Setting interface It is basically a mixture of TV box (Android) and projection. As shown in the figure, the upper part is the Android TV box, and the lower part is the global projector display settings.
[ZECO CX6 is unexpectedly full of functions]
In terms of audio and video, it has exclusive three tags of "movie, recommendation and playback", and the application is also directly displayed under the application tag.
The difference is that the "shopping and education" tag is built in, and the content quality is also good.
Its projection setting and system setting interfaces are the most uniform among the four.
[The most authentic Metro interface of nut A3]
The information density of its main interface is higher than that of other products, and it is truly metro oriented, without the concept of labels. The entire interface is like a flat "paper" , users can easily see the entire system structure . The home page specializes in film and television, and only has three modules: "film and television navigation, recommendation, and my application".
The setting interface directly follows the original Android 4.2, but the background color is changed.
[Shanshui X6 is almost original and needs to be improved]
Shanshui's user interface is significantly behind the other three products: except for the first two pages of the desktop, which have fixed appearance, even the system application icons are native to Android; There is no own application market, and the entry of functions is chaotic. The "browser" in the "application treasure house" unexpectedly jumps to the local application list, which makes people feel powerless
The setting interface of Shanshui is directly divided into three types: "TV box, Android, and projector", and the opening positions are different, which is confusing.
[Summary of System]
The Android performance in this era is generally high, and the TV box system itself is relatively light, so the four machines also have relatively rapid system response speed without any doubt.
However, there are obvious differences between their configurations: the ZECO CX6 and Shanshui X6 are both 1.8G in high configurations 4-core processor Among them, the eight core version of Shanshui X6 also has 2G memory and 8G flash memory, while both Nuts and Jimi have 1G dual cores.
However, it is regrettable that the performance advantages of ZECO and Shanshui are not reflected in the use of the system, which directly highlights the problem of insufficient optimization of traditional manufacturers. Moreover, Shanshui's nearly original system experience directly lowers the user's impression of the whole machine.
All four machines have the hardware capability to handle 4K video, but only Nut A3 can play 4K video directly without third-party applications.
As for the 3D function part, because the current home 3D technology is far from mature, and the real 3D film source is insufficient, its evaluation is of little significance, so it is directly incorporated into the appearance part. It should be noted that although only ZECO has its own 3D glasses, all four of them support 3D.
[Comparison of actual display performance]
The contrast of projection performance is mainly carried out by taking live photos. The test environment is the office lounge, which is almost completely dark at night (the above picture is the scene "wreckage" made up the next morning). The projection distance is 2.9m, and the projector is placed on a 1.2m high desktop. At this distance, all four projectors can project a picture size of about 100 inches. The camera is 3.1m away from the projection surface and 1.8m high.
The test equipment is Canon 70D, set at 1/15 shutter speed, F6.3 aperture, ISO1250 ， The focal length is 28mm, and it is manually focused to the center of the projection plane. The projector adopts the film or cinema mode with the highest brightness and contrast.
The focus ratio of the four machines ranges from 1.15 to 1.3, but their projection sizes are very close at a projection distance of 2.9m. It can be seen from the comparison of the above pure white samples that at the same distance, the largest picture (projection ratio) is Nut A3, followed by Jimi, Shanshui and ZECO.
Although the brightness of Shanshui is 2000 lumens and that of Nuts is 1500 lumens, there is no significant difference from that of ZECO and Jimi, which are 1000 lumens.
[Discrimination and color expression]
The four products all adopt DLP technology, which is the opposite of traditional LCD projectors. Its advantages are high contrast, clear and sharp black and white images, rich dark parts, clear black and white text display, and easy to do high resolution, but color related saturation, level and other performance is not as good as LCD projectors.
There are five layers in the color map. The first layer is the original map, and the following are ZECO, Jimi, Nuts and Shanshui. In fact, the color performance seen by the naked eye is much better than that shot by the camera, but because the brightness and color compatibility of the camera are far less than that of the human eye, it is exaggerated. It can be seen that polar rice is the closest to yellow, but it is still not very like yellow; Landscape red is the most positive, while blue and green are hard to distinguish.
The system interface with characters everywhere is more suitable for comparison of discrimination, and the comparison object here is fonts. At the projection size of 100 inches, a well behaved machine can see the font pixels on the projection with the naked eye. The projection definition of ZECO is relatively uniform, but not too clear as a whole.
The clarity of nuts is good, and the font clarity difference between the middle and the corner is not big, and the performance is relatively uniform.
The clarity of landscape is poor among the four, and there is a big gap between the middle and edge clarity. When focusing, you will find that the edge is blurred in the middle, and the middle is blurred again when you focus on the edge.
The definition of the polar meter is high, and the gap between the edge and the middle is small. Good performance.
The top is the original picture, and the bottom is ZECO, Jimi, Nuts and Shanshui, where ZECO and Shanshui have obvious color scale transition, which is not as good as Jimi and Nuts.
The following is the grayscale performance. The more squares you can see, the better the performance. Nuts are the best, followed by Jimi and ZECO, and Shanshui is the worst.
In terms of the skin color of the characters, the original red and yellow colors are predominant, making them more natural and transparent; ZECO is the most colorful, and the color even overflows; Landscape performance is regular; The nut may have high brightness. Under the same setting, the picture is white and the transparency is the worst.
In Optimus Prime's sample, the nuts are still too bright, and many details of the building on the right are missing, but it is actually better to see with the naked eye; ZECO launch is still strong, and the performance of Jimi is similar to that of landscape, but the color of Jimi is cold and the landscape is warm.
summary
The performance is hard to distinguish, but the cost performance gap is wide
Among the four machines, except Shanshui X6, the performance of the other three is remarkable. What is amazing is that the performance of nuts at the price of 2000 yuan is quite similar to that of ZECO and Jimi, and there are many more than the latter two, which embarrassed the performance of ZECO at the price of 6000 yuan and Jimi at the price of 3000 yuan.
The highest priced ZECO CX6 includes a set of independent audio, two 3D glasses and a USB stick, and the sound quality of the audio is acceptable. Its cost performance ratio is actually higher than Shanshui X6, but unfortunately there is no single projector version
In terms of portability, because the nut has a built-in power adapter, there will be one less accessory and it will be more convenient to carry. In terms of weight, even with the adapter, the Z2 is still the lightest, followed by nuts. Shanshui and ZECO, on the other hand, are "one cent for one cent". With the power adapter, their weight is far more than 1kg.
TV Terminator? It's too early to return
Android plus DLP technology enables the mini projector to be unprecedented and friendly to the people, and its performance is quite good. It is enough to meet the needs of home video and business presentation. However, their resolution is only 1280 * 800 after all, which is still a certain distance from the current 1080P LCD TV's general fineness. In addition, there are many choices for smart TVs of 2000 yuan and 40 inches. It is still too early to say about TV terminators.
But if you pay more attention to the experience of using large screens everywhere, the projector is definitely a better choice. On sunny nights, the experience of putting it in the garden or on the roof to watch movies with your family must be something that LCD TV can't do
Finally, more shooting samples are attached, and interested users can slowly compare them to find the appropriate machine from the samples they like.
