Save $50 on the pocket-sized RIF6 Cube Projector

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Clearly the copy writer and the graphic artist have divergent ideas of what’s going on here.

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Yea, marketing these for home use is kind of stupid. I use something similar to give presentations almost every week, but it’s a real brand, a Sony I think. You need to have a dark room, one window ruins everything, and most of us don’t live in dark rooms. Also, I hear they have TV’s now.

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I’m a fan of projectors and they are my preferred way to watch a movie. This little gadget is neat but at 50 lumens it’s very underpowered. Budget projectors produce at least 600 lumens and require a high gain screen and a dark room. Mid to low range projectors pump out around 5000 lumens and can be viewed in a moderately lit room on low gain screens without significant washout. It’s also a short throw projector so it will likely be between the couch and the screen. Not very appealing IMO.

edit to add: For a comparison, a 10 watt incandescent bulb produces a minimum of 75 lumens.

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Uhm, no. Not for a 50 lumen toy. It’s cute, though. But no.

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But you can watch your RIF6 while eating warm Soylent in your kitchen-free home! I wonder if the RIF6 people will advertise his endorsement

At 120" screen size and that resolution each pixel should be about 1/8" tall (in your pitch black room). Did I do that right? I guess for only $50 you can’t really expect much.

edit: whoa it’s actually $250?

Indeed. Do Not Want. Completely pointless waste.

(I could go on, but why bother?)

Yeah, and good luck projecting on a dark green wall with a 50 lumen projector.

I’ve shopped for micro projectors a few times and no matter the price I’m pretty much always disappointed. I do a lot of ad hoc training sessions and could really use something to do this sort of thing with.

Lately I’ve been thinking of a USB-powered monitor since I could also use it to dual-screen in random locations. I usually train small batches so it wouldn’t be too limited.

Anyway. I’ve seen this particular projector before but forgot the name. Disappointed from scratch. :laughing:

A 120" diagonal screen, (in 16:9 ratio) is 5825.18 square inches. A 1080p frame has 2073600 pixels.

sqrt( ( 5825.18 / 2073600) ) ~ 0.05 inches (1.27mm) on a side per pixel.

If the resolution is 720p, you have pixels that are about 0.08 inches (2.032mm) on a side.

If the resolution is 480p, you have pixels that are about 0.14 inches (3.556) on a side.

The adcopy doesn’t actually state a resolution, so it could range from really fucking crappy to halfway to decent.

From the maker’s site:
854 x 480 (WVGA)

Pico projectors are amazing marvels of miniaturization, but 50 lumens? Granted, I used to use 600 lumen three tube projectors for audiences of hundreds - with all of the lights off - but on the other hand, when small 1000+ lumen LCD and DLP projectors came out years ago I finally could stop worrying if we could get various rooms and venues dark enough for people to see the projected image. I really don’t want to go back to low lumen projectors and hoping for enough darkness, even if the projector is really cute.

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Is it fanless?

A 50-lumen projector might have a place if the low light is a trade-off to obtain complete silence.

But the specs don’t say…

It has a fan but the loudness is in debate. Some say it’s really quiet … From what I’ve read about other fans, the smaller it is the more likely it is to be annoying sounding so I’m not really sure how to take the “really quiet” assertion.

2/7ths of the reviewers of the noise say it’s loud.

At a measly 50 lumens this reminds me of the time I first saw the Sony Vidimagic.

The Sony rep had it on the conference room table when we walked in and when he was done extolling it’s virtues as Sony’s first portable projector -with a betamax in it!- we asked him to turn it on.

“It is on”.

Yeah, back in the day when “projection TVs” had those directional parabolic reelecting screens because the CRTs were pretty dim for projection. If you were sitting off of the screen’s axis, the image was even dimmer.

Also, the cube projector doesn’t say if it is ANSI or peak lumens (“ANSI” doesn’t even appear on their website), so I have to assume it is peak lumens.

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