hey everybody its Lyon Seidman and we’re taking a look today at the nebula capsule – this is a projector that integrates an official Android TV inside so you can basically just carry this thing around and get most of what you need projected through its internal hardware but it can also work like a traditional projector and it can work as a Bluetooth speaker as well we’re going to take a look and see what this projector can and can’t do in just the second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this projector is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this is manufactured by a company called anchor which might sound familiar to you if you’ve ever bought one of their batteries are charging devices they
make good stuff and the quality is definitely here on this one but it is not cheap in fact right now the retail price is 599 dollars I paid less than that during their crowdfunding campaign I think I paid about 400 bucks or less for it so it’s definitely carrying a premium price although these things typically go on sale and can usually be found for less than the suggested retail price at the time I’m recording this video it is not yet fully available so I think when it does come out we’ll probably see a lower price point but for now just keep that price in mind it’s not all that bright it’s about 200 ANSI lumens that’s because this is an LED projected device it’s got a DLP projector but an LED bulb which means it can’t be as bright as some of the larger more expensive projectors that might be out there and we’ve certainly looked at a few it’s what you’ll see in a few minutes when we hook it up is that you probably want to work in as dark an environment as possible to get the most out of it especially as you go further back from your projecting surface I will support back projection so it can reverse the image or you can just go straight on they recommend that you can get a 20 to 100 inch screen setup with it and I think if you’re going for the larger route again make sure it’s pretty dark out to get the quality out of it now inside it has an Android TV device kind of a run-of-the-mill one it’s got a cortex a53 processor 2 gigabytes of RAM and only four gigabytes of
storage but it is running Android 9.0 weighs about a pound and a half or 0.6 eight kilograms 680 grams so not all that heavy has a battery built in that will go for about three hours or so that was pretty consistent in our testing so it should be enough to be able to watch a movie without having to plug it in and what’s cool about having the Android TV built in is that you can have the movie on the device itself and just play it out without the need for anything else which is pretty cool now there are some ports here on the back you’ve got a USB type-c port for charging and power it cannot be used for data or display output you have a USB port here where you can connect external storage so memory sticks and hard drives and whatnot can go in there you have an HDMI input here because you can also plug in traditional HDMI devices to project out so if you want to hook up your game console or something you can do that but it doesn’t have HDMI out so you can’t use this as a TV box for example when you’re not in projection mode you do have to switch the device out of Android TV and into projector mode with a button here on the remote now the remote control will look very familiar to you if you’ve ever used an Android TV box before especially one you might have imported from China like I have many times it’s got a Google assistant button so you can do some voice commands which I’ll demo in a few minutes but otherwise it is the exact same remote you have likely seen in other places if you are an Android TV enthusiast like I am on the back here one other thing of note is an auxilary audio output in case you want that although the internal speaker here is very good it is loud it’s got a good range of sound it carries over a good distance I think it’ll work very
well outside so it’s very pleased with the audio quality that’s built in but you have the option for additional audio output if you want it it does turn into a Bluetooth speaker as well you can just push this button to deactivate the Android TV and the projector and just make it into a speaker the battery of course will last longer doing that if you’re in tension is only to have audio coming out it’s very good and I think on par with other devices that you might have seen in a similar form factor now should you forget your remote control you’ve got the ability to control the device right up top here with some capacitive buttons so you have your directional pad up here along with volume up and down and the back button these are raised here so you can kind of feel the difference between your navigation and your volume control so that was pretty nice to see there on the front you’ve got the lens for the projector of course it is a 720p projector it will do 60 Hertz and will demo that with a game console in a few minutes next to that is a little camera that focuses the projection output you can adjust this manually which you might need to do but generally it does a pretty good job with focusing and Keystone correction on the bottom you have a tripod mount so you can just put it up on any standard tripod or other devices that use the similar screw it screw hole there for that and then it’s got a rubber pad here for putting it flat down on the desk so very flexible from a mounting
standpoint especially given that many projectors don’t have that because they’re too big this one is quite small and portable all right so let’s plug this thing in get it set up on my wall over there and I’ll show you how it works alright so we’ve got the projector plugged in and projecting onto the wall we’re looking at about an 80 inch screen diagonally right now for this particular test and it looks pretty good I turn the lights off in the room here we are getting a little bit of light coming in from outside from the window behind the projector but note it is a gloomy and rainy day today so I do think if you are using this indoors during the day turning the lights off and drawing the blinds will get you probably the best possible output quality here it’s not going to be one of these projectors that can work in a relatively lit room but when you do have the bright lighting conditions it’s not bad it actually looks pretty nice on here now one thing I’ve noticed is that although the autofocus seems to work okay it’s not perfect and one of the things that I’ve been doing is going into the projector settings here and going to the manual focus correction and that will let you more finely tune the the lens on it to get a sharper image so if you’re seeing things that look
a little blury going in and making some fine adjustments there will help with that and those settings will carry over actually over to the HDMI input as well so unfortunately there is no manual focus control on the device itself which would have been nice to just be able to finally tune it that way so you have to go into the menu on the Android side and use the remote to get things just right they did just push down a firmware update to improve that a little bit it got better it’s still not perfect though but I’d imagine over time they’ll get it a little bit better than where it is at the moment it also is a pretty nice Keystone adjustment which gets the image aligned properly for the projection surface you are projecting onto so we did a little test earlier where we move something quickly from the ceiling over to the wall and you can see it adjusting the image to get the rectangle just right on that so it does a pretty good job with the Keystone correction but not so great on the focusing just yet now as an Android device it seems to work pretty well it’s got all of the familiar interface quirks that you’ve come to love or hate about androids latest TV interface will load up the YouTube app here and maybe go over to one of my videos we have an AC wireless connection on the projector here it’s able to go out and grab those videos very quickly and spin them right up I am not seeing any drop frames even at 60 frames per second so we were very pleased with the overall video quality now one thing you’ll notice here is this video plays back is that this is a 4k video but it is basically down converting to 1080p but the projector itself will further process that image to 720p for output but everything looks nice and sharp the color is great on it and again if you have the brightness in the room at a good point I think you’ll be very pleased with the overall image quality even at a large size here and again the video playback performance is excellent and that’s one of the things even with some of these low-end processors that we’re seeing on these Android TV boxes they do very well with video decoding here and everything seems to work really nicely and of course you’ve got the Google assistant onboard and it actually works better on here than I’ve seen on a lot of other Android TV boxes I’ve looked at recently that have the lower powered chips so if I push down the button
here and say tell me the weather in New York City tomorrow you can see it comes up very quickly and we get a response back very quickly I can go ahead and search YouTube and other supported features with the assistant as well so all that stuff is in there there’s no voice activation as far as I can see you do have to push the button down on the remote but it does seem to work just fine and it does work very well across a room as well now because it’s an Android device you can run Android games and emulators on it we booted up goat simulator that work really nicely it’s an open world 3d game the device supports Bluetooth controllers so you can pair up your controllers with Bluetooth or plug them in directly to the usb so that was pretty cool to see that working pac-man 256 was another Android game we played on it that one ran very nicely as well now we ran one of the 3d mark benchmarks and we couldn’t get them all to run the one that did work was the ice storm extreme which runs at 1080p there we got a score of 4455 which puts it at about half the performance of the GP dxd portable that we looked at a while ago that was powered by a rock chip processor that device could pretty much just barely get Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 games running an emulation on it this one being half the performance will not do well with 90s era emulation so if you’re looking to play emulators on this I think the Super Nintendo the Sega Genesis probably the PlayStation 1 backwards will be fine but n64 and Dreamcast and other more demanding emulators will not work well on here and you’ll probably want to plug in something externally to get those a higher end emulation experiences to
work but things are not perfect here in Android land because if you go and look for netflix on your capsule projector you won’t find it and the reason is is that anchor has not yet gotten the device certified by netflix at the time I’m recording this video they did say they are working towards that certification so it might change in the future but right now you won’t find it and what Ankur suggests you do for both Netflix and prime video is to sideload the applique Asians they actually send you off to a third-party site to download unauthorized copies of the apks to sideload in I do not like it when manufacturers do that especially one as reputable as anchor do the work and get the stuff certified don’t send customers off on doing some things that could compromise their security or privacy I know a lot of you watching do this all the time but it’s risky for consumers to be doing this kind of thing if they go to the wrong site or download the wrong apk it could not be good for them in the long run and it’s unfortunate to see that even though we’re dealing with some stupid DRM issues here the fact is this is a big company they could make it happen here and right now those popular video streaming apps are simply not supported on here I did try to chromecast Netflix over to the device here earlier that did not work either so right now Netflix Amazon Prime video are not available but it is a
software problem not a hardware problem so maybe they will correct that in the near future but it does support Chrome casting other things and right now I’ve got my Mac here that I’m going to chromecast through the Chrome browser to the capsule and I’ve set it up to do the desktop here so I’m just going to click share and what you’ll see here in a second is my Mac desktop showing up there I can load up a keynote presentation here for example and go to town with that so chrome casting here works fine I was able to also chromecast HBO and a number of other popular Android apps without issue here so overall Chrome casting works with most applications but it’s not going to work with Netflix so just keep that in mind as you’re playing with things but overall it looks like it’s probably a legit version of Android TV and I was also pleased to see that HD homerun DRM content works so if you’re watching live TV on a cable system that is DRM protected you’ll be able to watch it here through the projector this is HBO working right now doesn’t seem to have any problems at all it did have an issue initially but when I updated the firmware that seems to have corrected it the HD homerun prime is a box that connects up to your cable system with a cable card and allows you to watch TV on all of your devices and in full disclosure there an occasional sponsor here on the channel and I know it’s a topic that a lot of you are interested in so this does seem to be a legit version of Android TV which isn’t always the case when we look at these
kinds of devices so that was very encouraging all right one last thing to check out and that is the HDMI input I’ve hooked up my Nintendo switch docked to the projector with that HDMI cable and we’ll continue our game here and this is one of these games that runs at 60 frames per second on the switch when it is docked now remember we are only outputting at 720p through the projector but everything is smooth and fast and very fluid I only broadcast in 30 frames per second here but I can tell you looking at this it looks great so I think we are getting the full 60 Hertz out of this thing and overall I think it’s a very good choice for gaming the speaker is also quite loud I’m hearing it very distinctly across the room here and it sounds great so I think if you are looking at this for a gaming device I think it’ll do pretty well now we also tested button lag with my analogue NT mini console that console when connected up to a gaming monitor gets about 40 to 44 milliseconds of input lag between the time a button is pushed and something happens on screen I always like to do these real-world measurements to see exactly how things work we do this test by taking out my iPhone at 240 frames per second and recording the button and the screen and seeing how many frames it takes for that button push to get registered with this device we were seeing times between 64 and 80 milliseconds which isn’t bad actually for a projector so it’s not as good as a gaming monitor but it is comparable to some mid-range televisions that we’ve looked at so overall I’m pretty pleased with the button lag on this device I think it’s actually going to be very well suited for gaming so overall I am pleased with this I’m a little weary of recommending it at the $600 price point that feels like a lot to me especially given that you can buy a regular projector that is brighter and has a 1080p output for the same price or possibly less from a number of manufacturers but I do like how
everything is self-contained in here I like the fact that it’s got a legit version of Android TV which is something we don’t see too often so that is good and overall the Android experience is nice on this the speaker is excellent the gaming experience through the HDMI is also very good the fan isn’t very loud on it but the speaker certainly is so all together it’s a very nicely constructed portable projector that can operate on its own as a self-contained movie watching device without even having power attached for a couple of hours so they really hit all the marks there I just hope they can get the price down a little bit so that this would be in reach of more folks who I think might be turned off by the high $600 price tag so let me know what you thought down in the comments below and until next time this is Long Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold-level supporters the four guys with quarters podcast tom Albrecht Callie Ann Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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