AnyBeam Pico Mini Portable Pocket Projector, Focus-Free, Laser Scannig, Lightweight, Compatible with iPhone, iPad, Android Phone, Laptop, PC, Game Console, for Party, Home (Champagne)

This projector is very compact and the technology is amazing. It however has 4 minor issues that need improvement.The first issue which is hard to describe only effects the red component of the image. It has this circular ring wave pattern which propagates from the center causing the red channel to not be uniform in brightness. Its only noticable when something in your image is very red.The second issue is the clarity of the image. While every pixel is shown, the pixels are not "solid' and "stable". In a typical projector the pixels are very distinct and square in shape. With this projector the pixels are blurry in shape. As for the stability of the pixels they sometimes shift out of place and has the appearance of two very close images overlapping. This is a very brief things and quickly goes away. This however is happens a few times every 10 seconds and is somewhat dependent on the image shown.The third issue is that the image is not a perfect rectangle. This is a software issue which could be fixed if they added more controls. The left edge is slightly curved. Some crt displays let you control the keystone in the two dimensions as well as parallelogram and curveture of the image. This projector only lets you control the keystone in one dimension.The image is also slightly speckled which is to be expected from a laser projector.I really hope the next generation of this projector fixes these issues as I think this is the projector of the future.

TL;DR: A true 720p silent pico projector at this price is rare. I like that it's basically just a projector: No internal battery, no USB media playing, no fancy audio. Unfortunately, I couldn't get over the weird sparkling texture on the image projection.Pros:1. It seems to be TRUE 720p, not 480p with 720p "support". My FireTV stick automatically detected this and played video in 720p.2. Very light and compact, comparable to the size of a small smartphone.3. Throw distance is very good. At only 4 feet away, I was able to get about 40" of display.4. Black colors look amazing in a dark room, because they don't render the color at all. Brilliant idea. Other projectors try to block it, producing a grayish black.5. Barely uses any power. I ran it AND my FireTV stick on my 20,000 mAh battery, for 4 hours, and my battery was still above 80%.6. Great thermals with no fan noise. Does not get hot, just warm.7. Bright enough in a very dark room. The darker the better. I've seen worse in other pico projectors.Cons:1. It projects "Sparkles" all over the image. Like every character was a low-key Twilight vampire. This was the main reason why I had to return it. I couldn't concentrate. I tried it on my projector screen and walls. There were some settings that you can adjust to reduce it a bit, like green/blue alignment, or in a very dark room, reducing the brightness slightly helps. But it never fully goes away. I imagine for some people, this might be okay.2. Sometimes you can see a very faint set of "rings" extending from the center of the image. Hard to notice, but sometimes appears. That wasn't the deal breaker for me, because it was only occasionally visible.3. Audio is very weak. The 3.5mm jack can connect to speakers, but I needed to use a small amplifier at +80% gain to get a reasonable output.4. Keystone adjustments cause a slight distortion towards the edges, but it didn't bother me much.5. About every once in a while, the image had a chance to be covered with static for 1 second. It was somewhat tolerable because it wasn't consistent. In the 4 hours I play-tested, I saw it 6 times.

The media could not be loaded.  No other projector that I have found can do what this projector can do. For my use-case (project) this is the perfect projector. The key features for me were "true black" via the MEMS laser and it's fanless design. My use-case is unique and I'll explain how I use this projector below.Note: This projector does NOT work well with with Raspberry Pi 4b (for 8+ hours). It seems the RPi4b's HDMI timing is a bit glitchy every once in a while which causes the AnyBeam to lockup with a frozen image of whatever was displayed at the time of the glitch. This occurs within 8 hours of continuous display. I exchanged emails with AnyBeam support and they are aware of the issue but the issue seems to be on the RPi4b side. I would be nice if the AnyBeam firmware was able to recover from this issue -- maybe an AnyBeam firmware update at some point. Hopefully a future RPi4b update will fix the glitchy HDMI output.Project Background:I have an old Radio Shack atomic clock in my bedroom that projects the time onto the ceiling. This has been fantastic and still works great. However I wanted to display additional information onto the ceiling such as outside temperature, inside temperature, wind speed, thermostat setting, in addition to the current time. The additional information I want to display is available via Home Assistant. Home Assistant is a very powerful open-source home automation software. The problem is how to get this information to display onto the ceiling of the bedroom.The natural solution is some type of projector connected to a Raspberry Pi or a micro x86 PC. The good news is that brightness (high lums) is not something I need as the bedroom in pitch black at night and does not need much brightness to display readable text. In fact it needs to be very dim as to not be disturbing at night while sleeping. The problem is finding a projector that does not use a technology that "blocks" the light to achieve black. Projector technologies like LCD and DLP work by projecting a very bright light through a filter that "blocks" the colors it doesn't want to display. The challenge is blocking all light from a very bright light in order to produce black is not perfect. So black is really shown as dark gray. This is often called "picture-frame" as the entire display is illuminated and the edges of the projected display are visible even if the image is intended to be black.The secondary issue with finding a workable projector is finding something that is fanless. Since the projector will be located on my nightstand which sits near my head, having a projector with a fan that producing noise when trying to sleep is a non-starter. Not to mention that tiny fans are prone to fail and since this will be running 8+ hours a night, fanless is a requirement.AnyBeam projector to the rescue!Project Result:The AnyBeam projector is connected to a Dell Optiplex 3020M via HDMI via a DisplayPort adapter. I started with a Raspberry Pi 4b but had to change because of issue described above. Fortunately the mini PC is running at 1% CPU utilization so the fan never comes on. The PC is running Linux and some custom Python code. The Python code connects to Home Assistant and renders text onto a screen which is projected into the ceiling. Since this new ceiling display is replacing the old Radio Shack Atomic clock ceiling display, I also have ntp running to keep the projected time accurate. Through code I adjust the color brightness down to 15% to make it very dim which is perfect for sleeping. The great thing is that I can change the color brightness during the day and project perfectly readable text onto the ceiling during the day -- think nap time. :)I did find that under complete black room conditions that the AnyBeam projector was showing a thin white line at the bottom right of the projected image. It seemed to be under the 720th line of resolution of the display. The easy fix was putting black electrical tape on the bottom of the lens such that it blocked the unwanted thin white line but doesn't block (much of) the bottom of the display.Mount:The AnyBeam is mounted on a gooseneck to aim the projector on the ceiling of bedroom. The AnyBeam projector has a 1/4-20 mount so it's easy to attach to various stands.Code:The Python code for this project is on github under kkellner/rpi-ha-ceiling-display.