We’re big fans of Anker’s Nebula line of portable projectors, which combine its compact size with great image reproduction and affordable pricing. Suffice to say, they’re arguably the best portable projector options out there. This time around, the outfit is turning its attention to your living room with the Nebula Cosmos Max.
That’s right, Nebula is making the leap from portable projectors to full-fledged home theater systems, so you can enjoy the same immersive viewing experience the outfit delivers on the road to your home cinema. Will it be as good as the high-end theater projectors from Sony, BenQ, or Epson? We don’t know, but we have a feeling it will be competitive enough to warrant consideration as a viable option.
The Nebula Cosmos Max can project video in full 4K UHD resolution (3840 x 2160) up to 150 inches, allowing you to play contemporary 4K content the way they were meant to be enjoyed. It pairs that sharp image with HDR10 color reproduction, ensuring all colors pop out of screen as vivid and vibrant as they do in real life, while blacks show off deeper and darker for enhanced contrast. And yes, it’s automatically able to upscale non-4K and non-HDR content using built-in algorithms, so even HD movies in your library will benefit from the projector’s improved picture quality.
It uses a TI DLP rated at 1,500 ANSI lumens, so this thing is exceptionally bright, allowing erstwhile darker details to be more visible for cinema-quality realism, while a LED bulb, in place of a UHP lamp, enable a 13 percent greater color range and a whopping 30,000 hours of operation. There’s also built-in dynamic smoothing, allowing it to show high-speed action images with increased frame rates, so you can watch sports and play video games with crystal clear clarity, even in the busiest moments.
The Nebula Cosmos Max comes with all the conveniences you’ve come to expect from modern projectors, including keystone correction, auto-inversion, and high-speed autofocus, so you don’t have to fuss too much about setting the projector up properly. It has four 10W speakers built-in blasting out omnidirectional sound, so it should deliver loud and satisfying audio comparable to the best TVs without needing to be hooked up to any speaker, complete with a professional-grade DSP, Dolby Digital Plus, and a 12-band equalizer for tailoring the sound to your liking.
Since this is a modern device, after all, it has built-in Wi-Fi for connectivity and runs Android 9, allowing you to install a load of video and streaming apps, so there’s no need to hook it up to a separate streaming box. Each one comes with a remote, so you can switch to a different program from the comfort of the couch, along with a companion app (iOS and Android), in case you prefer doing everything on your phone. Other features include 32GB of onboard storage, quiet fans that run at a maximum sound of 32 decibels, two HDMI slots, two USB slots, and an RCA slot.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Nebula Cosmos Max. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $1,099.