Having a home cinema projector on hand can be useful at times. If you don’t want a massive TV in your living room all year round for example, or you don’t have the space for one. But they can be expensive, and unless you are going to get regular use out of it, probably not quite as good value for money as your TV in the end.
But what about the portable projectors that are currently available? The devices can be a compromise, offering you a way to bring a temporary home cinema set-up to your livingroom typically for less than it costs to install a permanent projector and screen.
The Anker Nebula range offers a number of options for people in search of a decent portable projector to add to their entertainment arsenal. The Apollo is a 200 ANSI Lumens rechargeable projector that bills itself as a pocket cinema. Because not only does it do good video, it also has impressive sound and can function as a Bluetooth speaker too.
Space
It does all this in an impressively small device too, so you won’t need to have a lot of space dedicated to the projector.
The Nebula Apollo looks a bit like a Bluetooth speaker, with a rectangular black object with a speaker grille covering most of the bottom part, a lens in top part and touch controls on the top panel.
In terms of spec, the Apollo is a DLP projector, with a 480p resolution, 200 ANSI Lumens and has HDMI and USB 2.0 ports. It supports Miracast and DLNA, and connects via wifi and Bluetooth 4.2. The speaker is 6W, which gives a reasonably loud sound, although when you turn it up full you might get a little distortion.
The Nebula Apollo has Android 7 built in, so you can install your favourite apps on to the device directly, allowing you to access streaming services, cloud storage and so on, as long as you have an internet connection. You’ll need to do that for some streaming services as they don’t all allow screen mirroring anyway, so it is a good feature to have.
Not all apps worked with it, with some crashing or shutting down unexpectedly, though the main streaming services held up well. That’s what most people will be looking for, and on that front the Nebula Apollo gets the job down.
Storage
You can also connect external USB storage to the device and access your video or images from there, or hook up some music directly to the speaker through external storage. There is a file manager on the interface that allows you to access the external storage quickly and easily.
The touch controls on the top of the device are, for the most part, easy to handle, although at times seemed a touch too sensitive. Handily, the Apollo comes with a remote that eliminates the need to use the touch panel. As a third option, there is the Anker Connect app, which doubles up as a remote control app. It’s useful for when you inevitably lose the remote, as I did within a couple of weeks.
The device comes with a power adapter in the box, but also has a built-in rechargeable battery, which gives you about four hours of viewing from a single charge. That is enough to get you through a few episodes of your favourite TV show or at least one decent film if you need to use it on battery power.
Regardless of your power source, the projector is both quiet and bright. The less ambient light you have, the better your picture, but for medium-sized rooms the projector does a good job. Close the curtains and grab the popcorn.
Although it goes up to 100 inches in the specs, we found it worked best at between half to two-thirds of that, in terms of picture quality. That still gives you quite a bit of screen to play with.
This isn’t a casual purchase though; at up to €500 in price, it’s something you’ll want to get a lot of use from.
The good
The size and the quality of the Nebula Apollo makes it a good choice if you want an occasional portable projector that can also occasionally multitask as a Bluetooth speaker.
The screen size goes up to 100 inches, according to the official specs, although this review showed it did better at smaller sizes.
The not so good
It’s not a cheap piece of kit, although it isn’t as expensive as other projectors. Its 480p resolution, while perfectly adequate for most uses, may not be enough for some users who will hold out for a higher resolution.
The rest
The brightness rating of 200 ANSI Lumens will work fine in a small- to medium-sized room. Bigger rooms will require a brighter projector though. You can install your own choice of apps to the device as it is Android 7; however, not all will work well with it. The main streaming services, however, worked well.
The verdict
A versatile and useful device to add to your home entertainment set-up.
