In a day and age when pretty much everything is getting smaller and more portable, the projectors you may have experienced in the classroom or office definitely aren’t getting left behind. Now to be honest, I am not a projector specialist. The only projectors I have come across are the ones that were bolstered to the ceiling of my classrooms or tucked away in some hidden corner of a movie room in a friend’s house. So when the chance came about to try the Merlin Wifi Projector Pro, I was totally all over it.
What’s inside the box.
The box arrived unassumingly on my desk. It wasn’t really a super small box, but it was light. Opening the box, I was greeted by the instruction manual, an egg shaped device wrapped in a plastic sleeve and a box which I assumed contained accessories. I picked up the device, unsheathed it and turned it this way and that. My first reaction- Is this the projector? Wow, it sure is small.
I put the palm-sized device down and delved into the black box of accessories. Inside the box there was a stand/tripod that could pack away nice and compact, an adaptor, HDMI cable and USB cable/charging wire. Tiny projector, tiny bits of accessories.
Turning the projector on.
Once I figured out all the parts and gave the instruction manual a quick once over, I took the cap off the egg-shaped projector and tried switching it on. I guess I was expecting that the device would come with a few zaps of energy stored. Alas, it didn’t turn on. No worries. I quickly plugged in the USB charger and adaptor, then tried the power button once again. A loud whirring-fan-like sound signalled that the projector was definitely turning on. Yay!
Visibility with the lights on.
Once the projector powered on, I projected it against the nearest wall to my table – a deep shade of pink. Now considering the Merlin Wifi Projector Pro comes with a brightness of 50 ANSI Lumens, I couldn’t exactly compare it to its bigger and more powerful brothers. I could see the welcome screen of the projector, but with the bright lights and pink wall, the image wasn’t 100% visible. If this were a foggy day, I would rate it at around 30% visibility.
I, of course, being the persistent kind, tried adjusting the distance between the wall and the projector to see if that would make a difference. After about 5-10 mins, I figured pink wall and bright lights just weren’t the best things to test the projector with. After another 5 mins of walking around the office looking for the lightest coloured wall I could find, I settled for a light grey wall. I went back to my table and figured 15 mins of charging time should give me enough juice to run the projector without being plugged in. And voila! I was right.
I trotted over to the grey wall, with my slightly charged projector, screwed the compact tripod in, placed it on the floor and projected it against the wall. I also turned off the lights in the immediate area, but with glass panels being the only dividers to the rooms, it only made a small difference. Light pollution in my small chosen area dimmed from 100% to about 60-70%. Lighter wall and somewhat darker lights and tada, image clarity had gone up from about a 30% foggy day visibility to about 60% visibility!
Also a quick note, there’s a small nob on the side that adjusts the clarity / focus.
Initial testing.
And what did I test first? A game of course. Now I borrowed my office-mate’s Android phone and downloaded EZCast from the Google Play store. Once downloaded, I accessed the projector via wireless connection and boom! I had the mobile phone’s screen projected onto the wall. At this point, the projector was about 30cm away from the wall. Projection was no bigger than a sheet of paper.
Unfortunately for me, my office-mate’s phone was brand-spanking-new and only had one game installed. Temple Run. I figured this should do. See how well I could play Temple Run looking at the wall as opposed to the phone’s screen.
1st round: Fail. Man, this was definitely harder than I thought it would be! It just didn’t seem natural looking up to play Temple Run as opposed to head-bent-over-a-device kinda game play. The pressure applied on the screen was different while playing looking at the wall as compared to when playing looking at the screen. Tricky, tricky, tricky.
A few people started gathering around me as I had chosen to play in the hallway leading in to the office. Since I didn’t see an adjuster available on the projector, I moved the projector back a little to project a bigger picture on the wall. Unfortunately with the light still pouring into my chosen area of testing, the further I got from the wall, the dimmer the projection became. At about triple my initial position, the projection was bigger but too washed-out to actually enjoy anything.
Office sounds vs projector sounds.
Since I couldn’t make the projection bigger, maybe I could make the sounds louder instead. With its built-in speaker and a side adjusting dial, I cranked the volume up to max. Unfortunately, the office sounds and open area drowned out the max volume of the projector.
Image clarity and usage in the office setting.
After a few more tries at Temple Run, I switched to checking out Facebook, then looking through images. It has the same clarity as with playing Temple Run. No obvious delays in projection and the images were visible, regardless of the light pollution present. In the end I decided to try this in a darker room.
Projector sounds & ending an office testing session.
After my grey wall testing, I moved back to my desk and plugged the projector in for charging. When I had initially hooked up the projector to the charging cable, it had made a loud whirring fan noise that I’d brushed off as an initial start up sound.
Now back at my desk, with the projector plugged back in, I could hear the whirring sound again. It was actually pretty loud. I could hear it sitting back in my seat in the middle of the office! I tried unhooking the cable to check if it was just a charging noise. The sound continued even when unplugged.
For such a small device, it sure did make a lot of noise.
Home Testing.
In a small room that’s about 6x6m roughly, I placed the projector on my little Ikea laptop stand/ table and initially set it up to project onto my white curtain. I placed it first at about 3m away from the curtain and linked my Apple iPod Touch via wireless connection and AirPlay. I’ve decided to try it out with a YouTube video.
Now with a completely dark room, with roughly just 5% light seeping in from the outside, the projection was definitely brighter. At 3m away, the projection is big and sharp. Sound was amazing in the contained room. I’m not the type who watches movies blasting through big speakers till I’m deaf. The speaker’s quality and power was sufficient enough for me to sit back and enjoy a good movie.
What the projector did lack was an audio output port. Not being super techie, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to hook up an external speaker and so had to make do with the internal speaker. The projector only plays sound from its internal speaker. Your device’s speakers are rendered non-functional when you connect to the projector.
Next I hooked up the HDMI cable to the projector and connected it to my laptop. I opted to play a movie from my VLC player. This time, I moved the projector to about 5m away from my curtain. It ended up taking the whole width of my curtain which is roughly about 3m wide. I totally could have just sat back, grabbed a bag of popcorn and enjoyed a big projection of my movie. But I didn’t have any popcorn. No popcorn, no movie.
Aside from a white curtain, I moved the projector to project across a white portion of my wall and was surprised by the sharpness of its output. Now I really wished I had popcorn.
Conclusion.
Pros:
The projector is something that would definitely come in handy for its portability. Literally small enough to fit into your back pocket and weighing almost nothing at 160g. Walk into a meeting with a laptop, tablet or mobile phone and your Merlin Wifi Projector Pro, and you’re set. You can charge the device beforehand or carry around the cables and stand without them taking up too much space.
Sound and image clarity are good but they do need to be contained in a fairly dark room with little background noise.
Cons:
The Merlin Wifi Projector Pro retails on JadoPado for AED 1,425. Call me stingy, but I think that’s just a little pricey. At only 50 lumens and no connector for external speakers, its price is almost on par with its larger projector siblings which have more powerful outcomes.
Oh, and the projector noise. It was a little disturbing.
Final verdict.
I have to give it to the Merlin WiFi Projector Pro, I now want my own pocket projector. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can afford one. It’s pricey!
Now if you have the spending capacity and your main considerations are portability and ease of use, you can’t go wrong with the Merlin WiFi Projector Pro.