If WALL-E was about to settle down for a movie night with his droid darling EVE, I imagine he'd be firing up a projector that looks very similar to LG's latest.
Projectors have been getting smaller and more discreet in recent years as the lifestyle, portable and ultra-short-throw segments of the market have grown to offer movie lovers big-screen images from versatile, unobtrusive boxes, but the new LG CineBeam Qube truly is tiny – just 8cm tall and 14cm wide and deep. And you'll see what I mean when I say it sports a Pixar animation vibe.
That distinctive handle can rotate 360 degrees to allow the 1.5kg projector to be easily transported from room to room, or indeed house to house (or garden).
But under the endearing exterior are some pretty serious specs. The Qube can beam a 4K image up to 120 inches in size, and quantity seems to be accompanied by quality too – the Qube's laser light source delivers a claimed 450,000:1 contrast ratio and can supposedly cover 154 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. A fairly modest 500-lumen brightness, however, means that wherever you want to host movie nights, you'll want to turn down the lights.
Considering the intended nomadic, 'place and play' nature of such a projector, an auto-focus feature (called Auto Screen Adjustment) is onboard to automatically optimise image placement and size for an easy, hands-off set-up, too.
You can hook up a Blu-ray player or other source to the Qube's HDMI eARC or USB Type C inputs, though the projector offers built-in access to several video streaming services including Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube, via LG's WebOS operating system as also found on its smart TVs.
Speaking of TVs, the Qube also borrows a feature we've seen on a number of them – the ability to display digital images matching the ambience of its environment when it isn't playing TV shows or movies.
Smart, neat, cute and – hopefully – a decent performer, the LG CineBeam Qube is an interesting home cinema proposition that we hope to see in action at the CES show next week, where it will make its debut. Fingers crossed we can hunt down pricing and availability information there too.
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