My six-year-old son is, as you can probably imagine, hugely spoiled in terms of the AV gear he gets to enjoy TV shows, movies and games on.
Of course, he doesn't really know that. He has no real appreciation for the fact that we recently watched Transformers One on one of the best OLED TVs, nor that the sound was coming from the five-star Sony HT-A9 Dolby Atmos system. He just loved the experience of it all.
But the reason he loved that experience (and our other movie nights) was that it felt a little bit like going to the cinema. Lights off, reasonably big screen, loud sound.
I've often pondered taking the home cinema experience to its logical conclusion by making a projector work in our living room, but have always felt that it's just not practical. Or, more accurately, not entirely worth all of the effort that would be involved.
Instead, one weekend when the weather was looking particularly stormy, I decided to take a mini projector home so that we could set it up in his bedroom for a bit of a treat – and it was a hit.
The projector in question is the Xgimi Mogo 2 Pro, which has actually now been replaced by the Mogo 3 Pro. We never actually reviewed it, but it's clearly not the most impressive portable projector.
The picture isn't very refined, it's not bright enough when there's ambient light in the room, and the sound is a bit shrill. Unlike some newer models, it can't compensate for background colour, either, and my son's wall is a pale blue, so in his room there's a coolness to the picture that certainly isn't 'as the director intended'.
In other words, watching movies in my son's bedroom via the Mogo 2 Pro is a million miles from what a serious home cinema snob such as myself considers to be high quality.
What it is, though, is great fun.
We're able to blast a 100-inch image onto his wall, which he can watch from his bed less than two metres away, and that makes everything seem huge – which of course makes it feel much more like the cinema than the technically far superior system in the lounge.
My son was, it's fair to say, blown away by it, and his innocent joy at his bedroom becoming a cinema was enough to convince me that the projector can stay.
We've now bought a Fire TV Stick to plug into the back of it, too, partly to overcome the Mogo 2 Pro's lack of a working Netflix app (a common problem with projectors), and partly because Amazon Fire TV devices are easy to set up with parental controls.
It's been a couple of months now, and my son's bedroom cinema still feels special. Turning the projector on to watch a movie still feels like an event, which means it's still something that happens just once a week or so. I'm much more comfortable with that than I am with there being a TV in his room.
It's fine to be snobby about home cinema – I've made a career out of it after all – but it's also worth remembering from time to time that the most important thing about movies is having fun watching them.
And, just sometimes, an average-performing portable projector can deliver that more effectively than a system costing thousands.
MORE:
Here are the best portable projectors you can buy
If, unlike me, you can go the whole hog, these are the overall best projectors available
