At last, a gadget worthy of a bucket list
Imagine what you could do with a portable, 300-inch screen and Hisense’s new C1 projector.
If you’ve been wondering why we rarely review home video projectors here in the Digital Life Labs, it’s not because we have it in for them or anything.
It’s more that projectors have it in for us. Specifically, they have it in for me, the chief TV reviewer here in the Labs.
The Hisense C1 “lifestyle” projector is about the size of a four-slice toaster – portable enough to take on holiday.
I’m a member of that unfortunate subset of a subset of the population who both see rainbows when they watch videos from most modern projectors, and who are bothered by seeing this so-called “rainbow effect”. (If you’re wondering how many people are thus afflicted,estimates range from 16 per cent of the populationdown to 5 per cent.)
In my case, most projectors make my eyes see rainbows, and twitch when there’s fast-moving, high-contrast action on the screen. (By “most”, I mean all single-chip “DLP” projectors, which are the most common type on the market. Epson’s LCD projectors don’t create the rainbow effect, however, and neither do three-chip DLP projectors.)
You can’t just whip this thing out anywhere. It’s designed to project a screen size anywhere between 65 inches and 300 inches.
So for me to say I have loved reviewing the new Hisense C1 projector, a single-chip DLP projector prone to the dreaded rainbow effect, it means I loved it a lot. Loved it enough to put up with an awful lot of eye twitching, which I really do hate.
The C1 is what’s often referred to as a “lifestyle” projector, meaning it’s portable enough that you can just whip it out when and where you need it. That’s as opposed to a “home theatre” projector, which you would typically install rather than whip out.
Though you can’t just whip this thing out anywhere. It’s designed to project a screen size between 65 inches and 300 inches. However, definitely for any screen size under 85 inches, and arguably for any size under 100 inches, a TV rather than this $3499 projector might be a better buy.
One hundred inches is a big, big screen, and needs a lot of clear wall space to project onto. Meanwhile, 300 inches is utterly massive, and not only needs a projection surface 6.6 metres wide and 3.7 metres high (ie, a barn wall), it needs the projector to be 8.9 metres away!
We have neither a surface that big nor a room that long here in the Digital Life Labs, so we’ve only scratched the surface of what this fabulous little projector is capable of.
We did project an image 5 metres, creating what would have been a 168-inch screen if only we’d had a surface big enough to contain it (it spilled onto the ceiling and down the corridor), and I can tell you that, even at that size, the Hisense blew our minds.
Being a lifestyle projector, the C1 is not super bright – it’s rated at 1600 ANSI Lumens, which isn’t even super bright by lifestyle projector standards – so if you’re going for utterly massive screen sizes, you’ll get best results at night or if your barn is light-sealed.
That said, at smaller screen sizes like 60ish to 80ish inches, we did find it surprisingly watchable in bright rooms. Given the C1 is itself barely bigger than a four-slice toaster, and given it’s got a proper, TV-like operating system and full suite of apps including Netflix (so you don’t need to remember to pack a Chromecast dongle), it could be the very thing to take to and from your holiday house and watch instead of a TV.
The C1 has plenty of inputs and outputs on the back, but you can get away without using any of them except the power input on the left.
Especially if you holiday in a barn. Honestly, if we didn’t have to give this back to Hisense, we’d rent a barn on Airbnb just to binge some TV show on a 300-inch screen for a weekend.
The picture quality the C1 projects is just great, especially when you’re watching Dolby Vision content, which this projector supports, and presumably also when you’re watching HDR10+ content, which the C1 also supports but which we never tested, having been mesmerised by the Dolby Vision.
It’s 4K, so the picture holds together very well at big screen sizes, though in our huge, 168-inch test we did notice the screen-door effect when we got close to the picture. That’s when it looks like you’re watching TV through a fly screen. It used to be a problem with low-resolution projectors, but it’s not really an issue nowadays. Just don’t sit close if the screen is that big!
It’s worth noting that, like many lifestyle projectors, the C1 achieves its 4K resolution by pixel-shifting a 1080p DLP chip – essentially it projects four HD images onto your screen in a two-by-two grid in very rapid succession, tricking your eye into thinking it’s looking at one 4K image. This is perfectly fine for movies and TV, but does slow the projector’s refresh rate down to 60 Hertz, likely making it too slow for serious video gamers.
So, yeah, I’ve loved reviewing the C1. Loved it so much, it’s the first gadget to ever affect my bucket list, in fact.
The list used to contain just one item: visit Antarctica. Now it has two: visit Antarctica, and rent a barn somewhere.
Or maybe not even rent a barn. Maybe I could just take a Hisense C1 with me to Antarctica? I mean, the C1 is small enough to fit in my luggage, and in Antarctica there’s bound to be a huge, white surface big enough to project onto, isn’t there? How cool would that be?
Hisense C1 projector
- Likes | Sensational image quality for a portable projector, especially from Dolby Vision sources. Proper, TV-like operating system and apps means you don’t need to use inputs. Pretty decent sound.
- Dislikes | Single-chip DLP technology means some viewers will be driven mad by the rainbow effect. No optical zoom means positioning is less flexible. Colours a tad pink out of the box. Refresh rate is a little slow for high-speed games.
- Price | $3499
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