While there’s no onboard battery, you can power it from a USB-C power bank with USB PD. What’s more, this projector optimises itself, taking care of keystoning and focus for you, although you can tweak all the settings (and maybe turn the rather aggressive motion interpolation settings down). Want home cinema everywhere on your own terms and without the usual hassle? The M2 is in a different class. As a short throw projector you’ll only need to keep it a few feet away from a wall or projector screen for a good image – whether that’s behind your sofa or in front of you – though you’ll need an ultra-short throw model if you want it right up against the wall.

The best portable projectors you can buy in 2023 1. Viewsonic M1 Mini Plus: Best ultraportable projector The specified 2,200 lumens brightness might not be as high as some other models in our best projectors guide, but the exceptional brightness control of the Horizon Pro mitigates this, ensuring that light lands where it needs to, and that even daytime viewing affords decent visibility. For the best experience, of course, you’ll want to close the curtains or save your movie plans for the evening, and bright, direct sunlight will banish portions of the image, but the Horizon Pro still fares better than most. Make sure your 4K projector is plugged into a power outlet with surge protection. Projector bulbs are incredibly expensive, so you want to make sure that yours never burn out when a power surge strikes. Buy a robust power strip that includes surge protection. And if you’re particularly worried about protecting your investment, find one that ensures damage to connected devices in the event of a problem. The VPL-XW5000ES combines Sony’s 4K SXRD panel and a 2000 Lumens laser phosphor light source, which, along with wide dynamic range optics and its Triluminos Pro colour processing, gives a 4K image so crisp and colour-rich that you could soon forget about the price tag. Throw in the X1 Ultimate Processor, with HDR Remaster and Dynamic HDR Enhancer processing, and you get the kind of picture quality that wouldn’t disgrace your local cinema. Grab one that’s longer than you think you’ll need. It never hurts to have the extra flexibility in case your placement plans change. Audio solution

Specs to impress: key 4K projector features

The LS12000 is a beefy (we’re talking 50 pounds) projector with a 3LCD system inside. It provides powerful color and white light output, strong contrast, and no artifacts we could detect during our testing. Its immaculate picture doesn’t struggle to overcome bright lighting conditions, but when we turn out all the ambient light, it steps up to simply blow us away. Many new 4K projectors these days come with ultra short throw technology, which vastly reduces the distance needed between the projector and the wall or screen surface it's projecting onto. Key specs – Brightness: 400 ISO lumens; Native resolution: 1,920 x 1,080; Speakers: 2 x 8W stereo speakers; Throw ratio: 1.2:1; Max recommended image: 200in; Inputs and outputs: USB-C, HDMI 2.0, 3.5mm audio; Wireless: 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0; Lamp life: 25,000hrs; Dimensions: 119 x 108 x 161mm; Weight: 1.1kg It’s pretty compact, measuring 8.2 x 8.6 x 5.4 inches, and weighing just 6.4lbs – making it relatively easy to move between rooms, or make use of the incredible auto-keystone correction, which swiftly shifts the direction and slant of the image depending on the angle at which the Horizon Pro is facing the wall.

As good as its picture performance is, the projector stumbles in a couple of places. Its attempts to adjust brightness on a shot-by-shot basis for some content can mean its overcorrecting in a way that makes the lighting quite jarring. Its motion smoothing can also be trouble as it helps reduce panning judder sometimes but introduces some glaring motion artifacts for everything else on screen. Fortunately, the Hisense L9G has a ton of available settings to adjust these features and many more, effectively letting users dial in the display however they like. It’s a flexible projector, too, with excellent manual and automatic keystone correction features plus a manual vertical shift, which helps you get a good, distortion-free image even if you have your projector sitting on a coffee table beaming a picture higher up on your wall. You might have to spend a little while tuning to get the best possible image, but the upside is that you’ve got plenty of control. The W1800 sits squarely in BenQ’s CineHome section, where its focus on serving up a cinematic experience on a budget serves it extremely well. It might be a bit on the pricey side, but there’s no denying it: the Anker Nebula Capsule II is the king of portable projectors.The PROJEXMini projector is a great option for a projector that's perfect for a casual environment. It delivers a crisp 1080p image, whether you're watching big movies or intimate TV shows.

And this projector’s talents don’t end there. It has built-in Android TV 11.0 streaming, plus a built-on 2 x 12W Harmon/Kardon speaker system that does a surprisingly good job of dishing out immersive sound. What’s more, XGIMI’s ISA 3.0 auto-setup system can get you a good, well-focused, correctly aligned image in seconds; all you need to do is point the projector at the screen. There are other projectors such as the Sony VPL-XW5000ES above that can give you even better, true 4K video in a custom-built setup, but you won’t find anything else that delivers this kind of image quality, this easily, and for such a comparatively reasonable price.Things aren’t quite as rosy when it comes to upscaling from low-res sources, though. HD sources will often come with a layer of grain – and which comes and goes pretty inconsistently, proving more distracting than if it was there all of the time. The upscaling from SDR fares similarly, often adding a harsh reddish tinge, especially in low-lit scenes or those showing the light of a campfire. The NZ8 is undoubtedly expensive, but the pricing of JVC’s new line-up is intended to reflect the comparative cost of 4K laser projectors from Sony. Interestingly the NZ8 currently has no direct competitor, so if you want uncompromising performance, peerless HDR tone mapping, comprehensive features and a high degree of future-proofing performance, this remarkable projector is in a class of its own.