Xgimi Vibe One review

At last, the summer weather is finally peeking through the grey clouds after a gloomy winter.

And with that comes the opportunity for outdoor movie nights aplenty as the evenings get longer, making portable projectors a tempting proposition thanks to their small build and reasonable price tags.

The latest portable projector pushing its way to the front of the crowd is the Xgimi Vibe One, which would look right at home nestled in the toy section of a supermarket. But there is more to this dinky model than meets the eye, as it makes its mark far more impressively than we would expect from such a low-cost piece of kit.

Price

Few portable projector models come close to matching the Xgimi Vibe One’s price of £219 / $269 / AU$479. In fact, it is the cheapest that we have had in our test room.

The closest projector to this price point that we have tested is the Wanbo Vali 1 (£270 / $279 / AU$499), which achieved a solid four-star score for its balanced overall image. The Wanbo is more of a coffee table projector, though, with no built-in battery and a bigger/heavier design, so it isn’t aiming at the same market as the Vibe One.

The cheapest portable projector we recommend is the Anker Nebula Mars 3 Air, which launched at £550 / $600 / AU$1300. That leaves the Xgimi model in a league of its own.

Build

The Vibe One resembles a camping lantern more than a projector. It is very light, weighing just 1.4kg, which is about the same as a large pineapple. It’s much easier to carry around than a big fruit, though, thanks to the sturdy handle on the top.

You can get it in two colour options: cloud ash or blue spark. There’s also the option to add some pizazz thanks to a pack of included stickers, which are great fun for kids or whimsical adults.

To activate the projector, you tilt the body up from the bottom to face your screen or wall (a screen is highly recommended for a better picture).

If you turn the projector on while the lamp is facing downwards, it transforms into a Bluetooth speaker. The base also illuminates in its ambient mode with eight colour options, which is a neat touch.

Features

The projector offers three brightness modes: Standard, Performance and Eco. Performance is clearly the most intensive of the modes as the fan immediately goes into overdrive and the brightness slightly increases, whereas Eco dims the brightness to extend battery life. We find Standard offers the sweet spot between brightness levels.

The Vibe One features a built-in battery, which the company claims can deliver a very specific 1.2 hours of life. That number is only if you are using the projector in the Eco mode, however.

In Standard mode, the battery gave us just under an hour of AV action, which is barely enough for three episodes of The Simpsons, and will only give you one half of a World Cup match.

This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if there were the option to give the projector some juice via a power bank, but there is no support for USB charging. Ultimately, that means the Vibe One is not as portable as you might think, so definitely consider whether you have access to the mains in the spaces you want to use the projector.

The 1080p projector can also project an image up to 150 inches and claims to offer a maximum 250 ISO lumens of brightness. That figure might not look massive, but brightness figures all need to be taken with a pinch of salt. What matters is the actual performance.

On the body, you will find a USB as well as an HDMI, which allows you to hook up a Blu-ray player or games console. Google TV is built in, which means you can access streaming services such as Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

There’s no BBC iPlayer and, although you can bypass this by using Google Cast, it would be nice to have native support. Channel 4 is not on the cards either, and when we try to use the casting feature with both Android and Apple devices, it doesn’t work.

Picture

We start our testing in a pitch-black room with the projector hooked up to an Oppo UDP-203 Blu-ray player to give it the best test. In terms of picture modes, you can choose between Movie, Game and Standard. We settle on Movie as the most cinematic of the choices, offering the warmest colours and best dark detail.

Playing Civil War on Blu-ray, the Xgimi delivers a punchy but slightly over-baked picture in the Movie mode’s default settings, but after adjusting the contrast and sharpness levels, we unearth a more natural image that portrays the green trees around an army staging post with more balanced, yet still striking, colours.

This naturalness is present in the rendering of faces, too. As the shaken journalists attempt to collect themselves in the car after a particularly traumatic experience, the projector digs up the smaller details in their faces despite the dark interior. Skin tones also appear balanced and natural, without fading into the background or looking over-vibrant.

The Vibe One continues to impress when we switch to some darker content. In the opening of Alien: Romulus, as a ship floats through the depths of space, the projector presents the dark abyss with an impressively deep black by budget projector standards.

It can’t quite differentiate the darkest elements of the scene (the point at which the ship ends and space begins, for example), but it does well with such a challenging scene considering its price.

Xgimi’s projector also creates a good sense of three-dimensionality as a xenomorph fossil drifts towards the camera, helped by the contrast between the black of the fossil and the ship’s interior.

The Vibe One’s motion handling is surprisingly natural as well. We switch to the scene in Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings where the titular character gets caught up in a bout of fisticuffs on the bus. As the vehicle swerves towards us, it moves with a smooth yet convincing movement that gives the scene a sense of realism.

Judging by the projector’s portable design and budget price, it seems likely that many users will be using the model in a more well-lit environment. So we turn on the lights in our test room to see how it copes. While a fair bit of dark detail is lost, the colours are still balanced and eye-catching.

Bright sunlight will inevitably cause the Vibe One more problems – it will be hard to enjoy a Christopher Nolan movie outdoors on a summer's day, for instance – but it will be fine for a spot of sunny sport, the short battery life notwithstanding.

Back to our windowless test room, and we put the Vibe One against the Wanbo Vali 1. The Vibe One is clearly the more detailed and colourful performer, and while the Wanbo skews brighter than the Xgimi, the Vibe One’s crisper, sharper edges and more insightful dark scenes make the Wanbo look a bit murky by comparison.

Ultimately, while expectations must be tempered at this level, the Vibe One does an impressive job of getting the basics right, resulting in a balanced, natural-looking picture that massively outperforms its price tag.

Sound

The Vibe One is not as strong a performer when it comes to audio, however, despite the apparent involvement of JBL in its sound system. That’s perhaps not particularly surprising, given that there are only two speakers driven by 3 watts of amplification built in.

While it can go reasonably loud considering its size, the Vibe One still struggles to make much of an impact even at maximum volume. When watching Civil War, for example, the lack of punchy bass makes a landing helicopter sound more like a knife on a chopping board than a pounding piece of military hardware.

The bigger issue, though, is that voices can get lost in the mix, so some dialogue is hard to make out. In Alien: Romulus, as the android Andy and his human sister Rain rush through the bustling mining colony, their conversation gets muddled with radio chatter in the background, which makes it hard to decipher at points. And that’s in a quiet test room, so it would prove even more difficult in a louder setting.

When voices are audible, they also sound somewhat tinny and artificial. In Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2, as Gamora and Peter Quill share a dance to Bring It On Home To Me by Sam Cooke, the relative lack of tonality in the characters’ voices and lack of bass detracts from the emotion of the scene.

The Wanbo delivers a louder audio performance with clearer voices, and outdoes the Xgimi in this area.

If you do buy the Vibe One, we recommend also adding a Bluetooth speaker for sound. Even something along the lines of the JBL Go 4 will be a significant upgrade for movies – as well as being an excellent little music speaker in its own right, of course.

Verdict

The Vibe One offers a detailed and cinematic picture for an impressively low price.

If it had better sound and a bigger battery (or USB power pack support), this could well be a five-star portable projector. Perhaps something to consider for the sequel, Xgimi…

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 3
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Xgimi Mogo 4

Also consider the Wanbo Vali 1

Read our Anker Nebula Mars 3 Air review

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