Cinemood is the little projector that couldn’t quite

Cinemood’s little 360P projector works, but you can do better for the money.

Jim Salter – Sep 30, 2019 4:30 pm UTC

reader comments

Cinemood is a $300 ultra-portable, lithium-ion-powered projector in a lightweight (8oz) form factor roughly the size of a Rubik’s Cube. It’s an Android device with no video input that projects from factory pre-loaded videos or onboard streaming apps like Netflix or YouTube at 640×360—and it’s not a short-throw projector, either. In our testing, Cinemood needed a 12-foot throw distance to display a rather washed-out image about the size of a 65-inch TV set.

In order to avoid burying the lede, you might as well know up front, we do not recommend this device at this price—but we do have some good alternatives for you at the end of the review if you’re in the market for a relatively cheap and portable projector.

This is not a large device. My 14-inch laptop, pictured, absolutely dwarfs the Cinemood box, let alone Cinemood itself.

Every last scrap of documentation for Cinemood, such as it is, is printed on the outside of this little box.

In this side view of Cinemood, we see a button marked with what looks like an overweight typo underline. This eventually turned out to be the power button.

This side view of Cinemood shows what I would later discover are the focus buttons. Victorinox (Swiss Army Knife) for scale.

This is the top view of Cinemood, showing us what amounts to a D-pad.

A tale of two projectors

Before we get into the real review, let’s talk a little inside baseball. A couple of months ago, a vendor I’d never heard of pitched me on reviewing Vava—a high-end, 4K resolution, ultra-short-throw home theater projector with a $2,500 price tag. This projector claimed to provide a 150-inch display from only a few inches’ distance, a Harmon-Kardon sound system, and more. I said sure, sounds fun.

A day or two later, I received another email requesting my shipping address so that the projector could be shipped to me. The little detail I missed is that the request for a shipping address was not from the Vava person—it was from someone pushing Cinemood, a $300 Internet of Things-grade projector that was neither ultra-short-throw nor 4K, nor equipped with anything at all like an integrated Harmon-Kardon sound system.

With that background out of the way, let’s review Cinemood. and if you want to enjoy imagining my confusion and frustration each step of the way as I mistakenly believe that I’m testing a $2,500 device, feel free.

The setup process was not enjoyable

There’s a growing trend in IoT devices of just not bothering with printed documentation, and expecting the user will pick up all he or she needs to know from the device’s smartphone app. Let it never be said that Cinemood is not trendy—there was no included documentation whatsoever. I thought maybe I could get started without installing the app at all, so I tried just plugging in the device. Its power LED immediately lit up green, but the projector didn’t fire up, and experimentally pressing every single button on it did nothing at all.

This application is actually very little help in setting up or managing Cinemood.

I am glad that Cinemood at least took the time to make sure users enabled Bluetooth and location services.

It would have been helpful if the app also told us that Cinemood itself needed to be powered on, that a green LED did not mean that it’s powered on, and that “fat red typo squiggle” was the power button.

The power button, which is not marked with a standard power button logo, does nothing unless you long press it.

I assumed this meant I would need to associate a smartphone before I could do anything with Cinemood, so I downloaded and installed the app. The app told me to make sure that Bluetooth and location services were enabled and that I was near Cinemood. Eventually, I had to actually place my phone directly on the Cinemood. It still couldn’t find the device, and it offered no further help.

Eventually, I started pressing buttons randomly again. When I long pressed the button with an overweight “you spelled it wrong” red squiggle on it, the device powered off. Long-pressing the button again turned it back on—but this time, the LED was white, not green, and the projector itself lit up, too. Success! After a longish initial boot sequence, my phone found the projector and vice versa, and I entered into an hour of setup hell.

During Cinemood’s setup sequence, you must give it your phone number—and it must be in full international format, including the +1. This is made extra difficult by the lack of a “+” key on the on-screen keyboard; if you omit the +, or the 1, or make any of several other possible formatting mistakes, Cinemood tells you the phone number is “invalid” but gives no further hints. Once you finally figure out you need to put in the + using your phone’s keyboard (since Cinemood’s own projected keyboard doesn’t have one) the system sends you an SMS for verification.

I saw a lot of this screen before I finally realized it wanted the full international format, including the plus sign.

During the portion of the setup loop where Cinemood asked for an email address, it assured me it would never need a password. Guess what it asked me for when I rebooted it?

When I canceled the Cinemood app setup, it gave me this success screen. Let’s slide films!

In addition to your phone number, Cinemood tries to get a credit or debit card number—it looks like this is mandatory, but if you minimize your phone’s on-screen keyboard, you’ll find a “skip” button to tap—and an email address. Once I’d successfully given Cinemood everything it asked me for, it. well, it returned me to the very beginning of the setup process. I went through this loop about four times before giving up and power-cycling it. Despite having assured me during the setup loop that I’d never need a password, it asked me for one upon rebooting.

I went through this setup loop a few more times, power-cycled another few more times, and eventually figured out exactly the right time to hit “continue without smartphone”—which actually just left me fully configured, with the smartphone app paired and working.

Using Cinemood

Remember when I said that I mistakenly thought I was going to be reviewing a $2,500 4K projector? I figured I’d need a better display environment than I could conjure up at home, so I reserved some space in a large meeting room with a big hanging screen intended for the room’s own ceiling-mounted, high-def projector.

This was overkill.

I initially put Cinemood on this little wooden podium, only a couple of feet from the screen, because I mistakenly believed it would be an ultra-short-throw projector. It is not an ultra-short-throw projector.

You need a fairly long throw distance to get a decently sized display out of Cinemood. This was about ten feet distance and a roughly 55-inch display.

Cinemood is not a bright projector. With the room lights on and enough throw distance for a 55-Inch display, you can’t even tell it’s on.

With Cinemood fired up and the smartphone app finally paired, I started playing with the distance and light levels to find where Cinemood was most comfortable. It needed at least ten feet of throw distance to get a decent sized display, at which point it was too washed out for the room lights to be up, or really even dim. With a roughly 55-inch projection, the room needed to be fully dark for Cinemood’s brightness to be acceptable.

One of Cinemood’s advertised features is Disney content pre-loaded on the device. Don’t expect feature films, full-length cartoons, or even cartoons you’ve likely heard of, though. I didn’t find any Mickey or Donald, just some My Little Pony knockoffs and a bunch of increasingly esoteric shorts, none of which were longer than five minutes. Cinemood also claims to let you upload your own content, but if that really is possible, neither I nor anyone who has reviewed the app on Google Play seems to have figured it out. Did I mention there’s no documentation at all?

Setting up YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime apps on Cinemood does work, although it requires patience and confidence. There are already icons for these services, but the icons have a cryptic “two seconds” caption underneath them. As far as I could (eventually) tell, this is Cinemood’s way of telling you something isn’t installed—it naively assumes that any remote content will require two seconds to download, regardless of your Internet connection speed or the size of the download.

In reality, it took something like a minute for the YouTube app to download and install itself, all of which occurs in the background with absolutely no progress bar, explanatory text, or any other indication of what’s going on. Once it finished installing the app, the “two seconds” caption went away, the icon was marginally brighter, and if tapped, the app would launch after a brief delay (again, with no progress bar or indicator). Once you make your way through all of this, YouTube and Netflix do work reasonably well.

I found Cinemood’s “two seconds” notice about as informative as “PC Load Letter.” The notice went away once the app was installed.

This is Disney content, but despite having three kids who are 10 years old and under, I had to Google it to be sure—Whisker Haven was a new one for me.

Cinemood is OK for casually watching YouTube videos, as long as the room’s completely dark and you’re not too fussy. (1/3)

Cinemood is OK for casually watching YouTube videos, as long as the room’s completely dark and you’re not too fussy. (2/3)

Cinemood is OK for casually watching YouTube videos, as long as the room’s completely dark and you’re not too fussy. (3/3)

This interface is already frustrating, but adding insult to injury, the Bluetooth-paired remote controls on the phone work intermittently at best. Frequently, tapping the checkmark button on the phone results in the button lighting up on the smartphone, but the resulting action not taking place on the projector. “Laggy response or dropped packet” is a game you’ll become very familiar with if you spend much time with Cinemood.

Giving Cinemood another chance

Although I wasn’t impressed with Cinemood, I did start out under the mistaken impression it was a 4K projector that cost nearly ten times as much. Maybe I wasn’t being fair. So I took it out to my parents’ house and tried it out in a spare bedroom.

The mysterious two-second warning on the YouTube app is back. I give up on understanding this thing.

If you’re determined enough, you can find Cinemood’s “settings” dialog; inside, you can find access to uploaded files. I have no idea how you’re supposed to have actually uploaded any files in the first place, mind you.

Cinemood managed roughly a 65-inch display size with the entire twelve feet available from wall to wall in this spare bedroom.

The 65-inch display I managed in this smallish bedroom was fuzzy and washed out, but at least the sound was greatly improved. Cinemood’s audio is not made for large chambers.

If you have the entire wall-to-wall distance to work with in a 12-foot-deep room, you can manage about a 65-inch projection area with Cinemood. It’s washed out, and with only a 640×360 real resolution, it’s distinctly fuzzy—my mom, who’s in her seventies, complained about it and made me fiddle with the focus for quite a while before grudgingly admitting that it was as sharp as it was going to get. On the positive side, the little integrated speaker—which was very tinny and sad in the big meeting room—sounded much better in a small bedroom.

All carping aside, Cinemood both looked and sounded good enough to keep my mom engaged through about half an hour of introduction to the strange world of Davie504, bassist extraordinaire and general YouTube weirdo. While you can do better—even much better—than Cinemood for the money, it did succeed in an appropriate environment.

We didn’t drain the battery all the way, but we used it enough to cast aspersions at the claimed “up to five-hour” battery life. Cinemood was down to 75% after about half an hour of use on battery alone; you should be able to get one typical movie out of it, but I wouldn’t bank on it making it all the way through a screening of Gone with the Wind or Titanic.

Portable projectors we can recommend

Cinemood occupies a weird space in projector land. With its own onboard Android OS and no actual video inputs, it most closely resembles Puppy Cube, which we reviewed last year.

Although it looks like Puppy Cube is in a dark room, it’s actually mid-afternoon with the curtains open and an overhead light on. The image is just being projected onto a really dark wood-grain desktop!

Puppy Cube shipped with a Netflix app pre-installed; logging in with my account was straightforward, and shifting it to wall display was as simple as setting the unit on its back instead of its base.

This is Puppy Cube on my kitchen counter in landscape mode, which is what the browser (Firefox mobile, forced to request Desktop site so I could use the Kindle Cloud Reader) generally wants.

Puppy Cube is a better device than Cinemood nearly all the way around; it features 720P resolution (you’d need four Cinemoods to create an equivalent projection), touchscreen interactivity on the projected image itself, ultra-short throw distance, vastly higher brightness, a much snappier interface, and a very wide selection of installable Android apps.

Unfortunately, Puppy Cube is still retailing at $1,000, and it’s significantly larger and heavier than Cinemood—it is portable, but it’s not something you’d just hand to the kids and tell them to have at it.

This is a real image of a game an AAXA S2 projected at 720P on the side of an 18-wheeler’s trailer at night. We didn’t take this image, but having used similar AAXA projectors, we have no trouble believing it.

This is the AAXA S2 LED pico projector. We haven’t used this specific model, but we’ve used lots of similar AAXAs over the years. 720P, 400 lumens, onboard battery, HDMI and composite video inputs. it’s good stuff.

AAXA’s S2 pico projector includes inputs for USB-C, HDMI, and composite video, as well as an output headphone jack.

If you don’t have the budget for Puppy Cube, or you want something both lightweight and battery-powered, there’s AAXA’s line of sub-$300 pico LED projectors. Although the newest S2 model doesn’t have any cartoons preloaded on it, it can play video from USB thumb drives or mirror the display from a device supporting USB-C video. Even better, it has honest-to-goodness HDMI and composite A/V inputs.

AAXA S2’s display is native 720P and 400 lumens brightness (compared to Cinemood’s 360P and 35 lumens). When on the battery, it defaults to half brightness—but that’s still much, much brighter than Cinemood. Although we’ve never had our hands on an S2, the similarly priced P300 is rated for the same brightness—and we’ve seen presentations given on the P300 at half brightness, in daylit rooms with the overhead lights on full.

Like Cinemood, the audio on the P300 was nothing to write home about, and we don’t expect the S2’s internal speaker will be much different. We’re not sure what to think about the six-hour runtime AAXA claims for the S2—it might be legit; we had no trouble getting the P300’s entire 150 minute rated runtime out of it.

The display on AAXA’s ultrabudget KP-101-01 is only rated for 25 lumens, so you’ll need a completely dark room. But it is 720P native—four times the resolution of Cinemood.

You again have real HDMI and composite audio/video inputs; there’s also an SD card reader for preloading your own videos.

Yep, that’s a tripod you see there. If it’s anything like the P300’s tripod, it will break the first few times you use it—but the mount is standard, and you can buy better tripods when it does.

If budget—or being able to just hand the device to your kids—is the primary factor in your projector shopping, you might also consider AAXA’s KP-101-01 “shirt pocket” sized projector. The display on this sub-$150 projector is only rated at 25 lumens—a little lower than Cinemood’s stated 35 lumen rating, though easily within the margin of error—but the native resolution is 720P, just like the bigger AAXA projectors.

You still get real HDMI and composite A/V inputs on the KP-101-01, plus an SD card reader for preloading movies yourself—although where and how you acquire downloadable movie files to use with it is entirely on you. The onboard battery is only good for 80 minutes, though, so you may want to add an $80 battery bank that includes A/C output if you’re going camping.

Testing the Cinemood TV, a Portable Projector That Can Fit in the Palm of Your Hand

The past year has reminded us that there really is no replacing a traditional movie theater experience, but tech has advanced far enough to give audiences a taste of the big-screen feeling at home. That’s thanks to a near-endless supply of digital projectors on the market that beam movies and TV shows across any wall or screen in your house, both indoors and outdoors.

As tech is wont to do, the next step for these projectors is to get smaller and more portable. And that’s the market Cinemood is trying to crack. By offering a projector no bigger than an apple, the company is betting that its on-the-go convenience will outweigh some of its own built-in limitations. To see if it hit the mark, the company provided me with its latest model, the Cinemood TV, to give it a test run. Here’s what I found.

A Pint-Sized Projector for a Younger Crowd

There’s one major theme that runs throughout Cinemood’s brand: portable kids entertainment. Just take a look at the company’s website and you instantly meet the smiling faces of Mickey Mouse, Aladdin, and Frozen‘s Elsa, to drive home the point that this projector is meant for parents who want to occupy their tots during those rainy afternoons inside. And for that, it mostly works.

The projector itself comes preloaded with Netflix, Disney+, and various other kid-friendly content like guided storybooks with voiced narration and illustrations. While the library isn’t stocked with an endless amount of stories, the 50-plus that are available for free should probably keep the 6-and-under crowd hooked for a while.

You’ll also find a handful of games on the device, though you won’t mistake it for a Nintendo Switch anytime soon. Ghost Hunt, for example, tasks players with handling the Cinemood like a controller and aiming it to zap the ghouls projected onto the wall. It’s a novel diversion that takes advantage of the device’s 360° capabilities, but in terms of depth, think of it as a rudimentary mobile game. While a few games and those 50-plus stories come free on the device, other titles need to be purchased through the Cinemood store, which is why the device allows you to upload your payment information once you register. (Parents might not love the idea of their kid’s projector also housing their credit card numbers, though.)

Getting Started

The installation itself is fairly painless—you just have to register your Cinemood with an email address and connect it to your Wi-Fi (you’ll also be asked for your credit card information immediately, which you can just ignore). From there, download the Cinemood app on your phone from Google or Apple and pair the two devices through Bluetooth. The phone app basically acts as your remote control if you don’t want to navigate menus using the buttons on the device itself. It’s definitely the easier option but not without its drawbacks, which I’ll get into later.

Then there’s that whole portability thing. Measuring in at around 3 inches on each side, the Cinemood can certainly be brought pretty much anywhere you go, and it projects just fine from a few feet away, making it an easy distraction for a kid on a long car trip. At home, whatever you’re watching can be beamed right onto a flat white wall or ceiling without too much of an issue, so my drab, undecorated apartment was the perfect test bed for movies in the living room and YouTube recipe tutorials splashed across my kitchen walls. While you don’t really need a white screen to display on, it might be worth it if you’re investing hundreds of dollars in a Cinemood.

So, how does it perform?

Outside of the kid content, the biggest selling point of the Cinemood is being able to project Netflix, Sling, YouTube, Amazon Video, Disney+, and Hulu content directly from the device’s pre-programmed apps. And once I logged into my accounts and got streaming, I noticed the picture compared favorably to my 2017 MacBook Pro, if not a little better. The company states that the device has a resolution of 848×480, and while I’m no expert there, it’s definitely clear enough to be enjoyable. Once I found the sweet spot for distance, positioning, and focus, the image stayed vivid and crisp, with legible text and a decent amount of visible detail. It wasn’t 4K quality, but it was more than serviceable.

To get the most out of the image, you’ll want to make sure the room is pitch-black and that you’re only around 6 to 12 feet away from your wall or screen. You could move even closer and retain the same resolution, of course, and the company says even a distance of 200 inches away should work fine. But everyone’s home setup is different, and I found 8 to 10 feet away to be ideal.

The results were less promising during the day in my living room, which attracts a lot of light due to my double glass doors. The image got noticeably fainter, and I had to move rooms to find a suitable viewing spot to continue testing. It looked fine in daylight if the Cinemood was only two or three feet away from a wall—but nobody will do that outside of a kid in a playroom. If you’re looking to sit down for a movie during the day, you might need to make some room adjustments first.

One of the downsides of Cinemood’s built-in version of Netflix is that it can be a chore to navigate. When using the phone as a remote, you’re forced into a trackpad-like setup that makes it difficult to scroll up and down the menus. At one point, the system was so unresponsive that I was forced to just stick to Netflix’s search function to find a movie to test out. Frustrated, I just typed in “Batman” and hoped for the best.

This led to me watching The Dark Knight on my ceiling as I laid on my back with the projector on my chest—but it didn’t matter, because I found myself completely sucked in within minutes. In the right pitch-black environment with the proper distance from the screen, the Cinemood does its job well. And while the image quality holds up fine, the biggest surprise was the rock-solid audio offered from the tiny device’s built-in speakers. I was getting plenty of deep, trembling bass, but never did it overshadow the dialogue or the score. Taken together, the device does provide an absorbing experience under the right circumstances.

Where the Cinemood Lags Behind

What the device touts in portability it lacks in flexibility. Once you get past the pre-installed streaming apps, you’ll quickly find your options pretty limited. Unlike other models on the market, there’s no HDMI port on the Cinemood to hook up to your laptop, Blu-ray player, or video game console. So, you’re out of luck if you’ve got shelves of movies and TV shows on discs that you want to show off.

This forced me to be a little creative when finding more uses for the device. I used Google Home to mirror content from my phone onto the Cinemood, which was a revelation when I realized I could project comics from my Comixology app onto my ceiling. With the app’s guided click-through feature, I had vivid comic panels displayed across my apartment with text that was more than big enough to make out clearly. But if you want to project an outside app like HBO Max or Apple TV+, you’ll have to hope it’s not blocked from screen mirroring and that the quality doesn’t get dinged along the way.

And just as I was getting into The Dark Knight, I quickly noticed the projector’s other big drawback: the battery life. In 10 minutes, the battery drained around 11 percent. Do the math, and you’ll see how tough it would be to remain wireless during an entire movie or TV marathon. To really get some mileage out of this thing, you’ll have to remain tethered to the charging cable, which kind of hurts the whole portability thing. The company says the battery will last around two-and-a-half hours at maximum brightness while streaming content online, though that sounds like a generous estimate. They suggest putting the projector in offline mode and watching downloaded content to get four hours out of a charge.

The Verdict

At $999 (temporarily reduced to as low as $449 if you pre-order for a June delivery), the Cinemood TV isn’t a perfect fit for film buffs and proud bingers who want an authentic indoor/outdoor theater experience for the home. The limited number of apps, short battery life, and the funky controls aren’t geared toward marathon viewing. But if you have kids who want to watch Disney+ wherever there’s a spare wall, or are financially comfortable enough to splurge on a portable device that can stream Netflix onto your ceiling at night, there might be a spot in your ever-increasing army of tech for the Cinemood, especially if you can get it during its current Easter sale.

You can learn more about the Cinemood TV here.