Xgimi MoGo 3 Pro review

Xgimi has rapidly established itself as one of the most imaginative and dynamic projector brands on the market. It’s proved consistently unafraid to blaze new feature trails, push picture quality to startling new extremes, experiment with a wide range of different projector types, and get playful with projector designs. Not every innovation Xgimi has delivered has fully paid off, but most of the brand’s projectors are at the very least interesting. A trend kept very much alive by the brand’s new ultra-portable MoGo 3 Pro.

Price

The Xgimi MoGo 3 Pro is good value regardless of on which side of the pond you buy it. Its £429 / $449 price beats the current price of that other popular barrel-shaped ultra-portable projector, Samsung’s The Freestyle, by more than 25 per cent, while also substantially undercutting more performance- rather than convenience-led portable models such as the Nebula Mars 3 Air and LG CineBeam Q.

The Xgimi MoGo 3 Pro also combines both a really cute and quite premium feeling design with a promising set of features for its money, including HDR playback, built-in Google smarts, long LED lamp life, and an integrated stereo sound system designed with the audio gurus at Harman Kardon.

Design

Once we’ve figured out how to open it up from its neatly closed native condition, we pretty much fall in love with the MoGo 3 Pro’s design. For starters, the way it locks down into a sealed cylinder with a rigid spine on the back and a built-in carry loop makes it one of the most robustly portable projectors we’ve seen. The projector’s lock down/open out process is also bizarrely satisfying, as well as making you feel weirdly cool while you do it. Or maybe that’s just us.

In its tucked-away state, the MoGo 3 Pro sports a sharp two-tone silvery finish, with the support spine and bottom speaker section wearing a darker silver than the main projector barrel.

The projector slides up from the speaker-sporting base and then rotates around on the spine for use smoothly and robustly, and we’re pleasantly surprised by how stable the unit feels once the projector is angled to the correct position. That said, we’d still suggest you try to train toddlers and pets to stay away from it if possible, as its build means it's not as immune to tumbles as a regular projector design.

The projector barrel can be rotated through an impressive 130 degrees to help you get the image in the right place on your wall or screen – a degree of flexibility that’s bolstered, as we’ll see in the next section, by a wide-ranging auto set-up system.

Two last surprising design features of the MoGo 3 Pro are its ability to output a pulsating light effect when you’re using it as a Bluetooth music speaker, or function as an ambient light emitter when you’re not using it for any other purpose.

The MoGo 3 Pro ships with a likeable remote control that combines a nice weight and long, narrow design with a logical layout and welcome button-backlighting.

Features

The design of the MoGo 3 Pro is arguably its single biggest unique feature. It combines genuine portability with a level of set-up flexibility that not even the likes of Samsung’s Freestyle or Nebula’s Capsule 3 can match.

It’s worth noting early on that Xgimi describes the MoGo 3 Pro as a ‘portable outdoor movie projector’. This sets expectations right away that this is perhaps not an ideal projector for home entertainment use – though our experience of using it in a variety of locations suggests that Xgimi’s own definition is more limiting than it needs to be.

To Xgimi’s credit, the MoGo 3 Pro’s swish design doesn’t preclude it from playing host to some promising specifications and a solid set of set-up and content options.

Its LED-lit DLP optical system, for instance, is rated to deliver around 25,000 hours of life and is reckoned to cover a massive 90 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum used in the mastering of most of today’s high dynamic range content. The HDR support only runs to HDR10, with no Dolby Vision or HDR10+, but any sort of HDR support on a lifestyle projector at this sort of level counts as a bonus. Especially if it’s backed up by the sort of colour range support the MoGo 3 Pro is claiming.

The MoGo 3 Pro’s HDR talents may be challenged, though, by its hardly-blazing claimed peak brightness output of 450 ISO lumens. To be fair, this actually isn’t a bad figure for such a cheap and convenience-led projector, but for context, ‘regular’ projectors now routinely deliver 3000 lumens and more in their bid to cope with HDR, while the recently reviewed Epson EF-22 portable projector claims 1000 ISO lumens.

The MoGo 3 Pro carries a native Full HD resolution – a decent finding for such an affordable portable projector – that can be stretched, Xgimi claims, to a 200-inch maximum image size. As we’ve come to expect with convenience/ultra-portable projectors these days, the MoGo 3 Pro can auto-calibrate focus, keystone and even image size to make set-up as easy as possible, as well as shift the image around any obstacles that might appear between its lens and the screen. The auto keystone part of the equation doesn’t work as consistently well for us during testing as the other parts of the auto-set-up system, but adjusting things manually when necessary isn’t too onerous.

Connectivity, as usual with ultra-portable projectors, is limited. The only physical inputs are a USB port supporting multimedia playback, a USB-C power input and a micro HDMI input capable of supporting video inputs up to 1080/60Hz. The USB-C power input enables the projector to be powered either by an included Type C mains plug and cable or a Type C 65W power bank. Note that the MoGo 3 Pro doesn’t have a built-in battery.

The projector also supports both Bluetooth (5.1) and wi-fi wireless connectivity, the former for streaming music from smartphones and tablets, the latter for providing internet access for an integrated Google TV smart system. Google TV carries all the main global streaming apps most people will want, including a fully licensed version of Netflix, as well as Apple TV, YouTube, Prime Video and the ITVX and My5 UK terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps. There is no functioning version of Disney+ at the time of writing, though, or the UK’s Freeview Play, BBC iPlayer and Channel 4 catch-up apps.

We’re pleased to find the projector’s picture presets including a Game option alongside the more TV and movie-friendly options, especially as this gets input lag down to a very respectably low 27ms.

The audio system built into the MoGo 3 Pro’s base has been designed by respected audio brand Harman Kardon and is rated to deliver 2 x 5W of output power. It’s even capable of decoding Dolby Atmos soundtracks – though this will likely prove a pretty optimistic talent with so few channels and so little power to play with.

Xgimi makes a trio of optional extras for the MoGo 3 Pro: a nicely fitted carry case, an extendable tripod stand, and a so-called Creative Optical Filter that attaches over the lens and magnifies the image by a factor of six so that specially designed starry night, lush rainforest and underwater paradise images played through the projector can deliver a much larger ambient effect in your room.

Picture

In some ways, at least, the Xgimi MoGo 3 Pro’s picture quality doesn’t feel like it’s coming out of such an overtly design- and convenience-led projector. It gets every pixel of potential out of its native Full HD resolution, for instance, delivering images with excellent snap and finesse. Even if you push them up to the 100 inches or so that we’d consider the largest you can sensibly go before they start to lose too much brightness for comfort.

The clarity remains intact with motion, too, even if you’re watching a 24p source, with no real blur to worry about and judder levels that feel more cinematic than jarring. As we usually find with DLP projector types, moreover, the sharpness doesn’t come at the expense of noticeable pixel structure in the image; even, again, when we push the projector to the outer limits of its image size capabilities.

The MoGo 3 Pro follows other Xgimi projectors we’ve seen in conjuring up a markedly wider colour range than not just the vast majority of other portable projectors, but the vast majority of affordable projectors, period. There’s nothing forced or artificial looking about its expansive palette, either. In fact, while it can turn up the colour heat exceptionally well with the most vibrant HDR content, it also handles subtler tones such as skin tones (and including those delivered in the much narrower SDR BT709 gamut) with excellent subtlety, balance and naturalism. Even within the same film or TV show.

The most vibrant tones retain good levels of blend-nuance, too, ensuring that they don’t start to look cartoonish or one-dimensional.

The MoGo 3 Pro couldn’t serve up the sort of colour impact and range it does if it wasn’t capable of punching out more brightness than we’d expect to see from a projector claiming just 450 ISO lumens of light. It gets so much value out of its LED lighting system, in fact, that you even get a slight sense of HDR’s extra intensity, at least in the brightest peaks of HDR images. A little subtle detail can get ‘clipped’ out of these HDR highlights, but the effect is still more of a pleasant surprise than a problem.

The brightness is just about sufficient, too, to let the MoGo 3 Pro’s pictures remain watchable in a little ambient light – a particularly handy talent for a projector explicitly designed to be used in a wide variety of environments, including, potentially, campsites.

While the MoGo 3 Pro’s brightness is a pleasant surprise in some areas, though, it is also responsible for a couple of issues. First, dark scenes and dark picture areas tend to lose subtle shadow details, and second, deep colours in dark scenes tend to desaturate quite heavily, leaving some of them looking almost black and white.

These lost shadow details and dark colour saturation issues are more of an issue with HDR content than SDR, too, due to the extra greyness that appears over dark scenes when the MoGo 3 Pro has to increase its brightness output to accommodate HDR’s expanded light range. The extra greyness essentially consumes faint shadow details and shifts dark colour tones.

One other issue with our test sample involves slightly uneven brightness across the image. This isn’t noticeable with bright scenes, but during dark shots, the left side of the image looks slightly lighter than the right.

To be clear, these issues don’t by any means nullify the MoGo 3 Pro’s surprising image strengths, but they are just problematic enough to remind us that, while some of its picture efforts are commendable, at heart it is still a projector that is focused more on convenience than absolute picture performance.

Sound

The MoGo 3 Pro’s sound resembles its pictures in the sense that it’s actually pretty solid by the standards of ultra-portable projectors but doesn’t quite go far enough to make you forget you’re compromising on performance in return for a cool lifestyle design.

The most predictable issues are that it can’t get as loud as we’d like (though we guess other people on a campsite might actually be grateful for this) and that it doesn’t project its sound enough to make it appear to be coming from the vicinity of the pictures it’s supposed to be accompanying – despite the speakers being designed to output a 360-degree soundfield. Dialogue, in particular, tends to feel rather trapped inside the projector’s compact form.

With so little space for the integrated speakers to work with, it’s also no great surprise to find that the MoGo 3 Pro’s sound doesn’t have much bass to it, or many gears to shift through during action scenes.

The good news is that the MoGo 3 Pro’s sound is surprisingly clean and crisp, helping it deliver lots of detail and ensuring that, while dialogue may not enjoy much ‘throw’, it is at least always easy to make out. We are also surprised to hear how much the projector benefits from being fed a Dolby Atmos mix in terms of placing details with more specificity and creating at least the illusion of a larger audio presence in the process.

The MoGo 3 Pro seems to be sensibly working within its speaker limits, too, in the sense that its sound doesn’t succumb to aggressive distortions or dropouts with either movie or Bluetooth music sources. In fact, it’s really quite enjoyable as a small-scale Bluetooth speaker – especially with its accompanying light show pulsing away alongside the music.

Verdict

While the Xgimi MoGo 3 Pro’s affordable price, clever and attractive ultra-portable design and eye-catching integrated light features prove to be its most potent attractions, it’s also a decent enough picture and sound performer for a projector of its type – so long as you don’t expect too much.

SCORES

• Picture 3
• Sound 3
• Features 4

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