The Aurzen Boom Mini earns higher marks for its audio than for its image quality, but it offers enough on both scores—including a high brightness for its price—to make it a reasonable choice.
The Aurzen Boom Mini is a cross between a high-end mini projector and a low-end room-to-room portable. Its image quality, brightness, and price ($349.99 list) would put it firmly in the first group, except that its size, weight, and emphasis on audio quality all argue for the second. However you choose to think of it, though, it’s brighter than less expensive models with otherwise similar features, including Aurzen’s own Eazze D1G. And compared with the somewhat more expensive Xgimi Elfin Flip, the Boom Mini can’t show rainbow artifacts, which can be a key issue for those who see them easily.Design: LCD Means Rainbow-Free
The Boom Mini—available in black, off-white, green, blue, or gray, depending on where you buy it—is similar to the Eazze D1G in many ways. But the Boom Mini is brighter, rated at 500 ANSI lumens, and with a notably better sound system (more on that later). It takes advantage of essentially the same one-LCD chip design, using a single red, green, or blue filter on each cell in the LCD to create a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel image. Shining a white LED light source through the LCD sends all three primary colors to the screen at once, avoiding any possibility of showing the red/green/blue flashes (rainbow artifacts) that come from cycling through the colors one at a time, as with single-chip DLP projectors.
A second key difference from the Eazze D1G is that the Boom Mini comes permanently mounted on a stand that lets it pivot over a range of 110 degrees, from just a few degrees down to straight up. This is particularly helpful since—as with most single-chip LCD models we’ve seen—the lens offset puts the center of the image directly in front of the projector when aimed straight ahead, blocking the view of anyone sitting behind it. The stand makes it easy to position the projector lower and still have the image at the height you want.
The Boom Mini weighs only 4.7 pounds, but its 7.6-by-9.1-by-7-inch (HWD) size makes it a little awkward to move much farther than room to room or to the backyard. Physical setup consists of little more than plugging it in and connecting to a video source. The auto setup features include auto focus, which worked nicely in my tests, as well as auto keystone correction, fit to screen, and obstacle avoidance.
