Epson MovieMate 25 Projector Review - Summary

Posted on April 9, 2006 by Art Feierman

To summarize the MovieMate 25 - Easy! Easy to place in your room, easy to hook up, and easy to use. Excellent price/performance. Fun! And if that's not enough, a great warranty, from a company already well known for building extremely reliable products.

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It is my belief that if you are a purist looking for the highest posible image quality, in a low cost solution for watching movies, an all-in-one projector is probably not the solution for you. You would be better served by going with an entry level dedicated home theater projector, like the Optoma H27, or InFocus 4805 (and almost certainly InFocus's brand new IN72 that will replace their 4805). There are others too, like the Epson Home 20, which we haven't reviewed yet, as well as the BenQ PE5120...

But, the MovieMate does exactly what it is designed to do. Provide a good quality solution for movies, video game playing, TV watching, etc., on a really large screen - a size well beyond the largest big screen TVs and plasma displays. It will also show your photos if you put them on a CD, and it plays regular CDs and also MP3 music on CD. That makes it one versatile and impressive entertainment center.

On top of that, a MovieMate can project an 80" diagonal image, or 100", even larger, for around the $1000 mark. A 65" big screen TV is twice that cost, and a 65" plasma - well, you are looking at closer to $10,000.

So, a MovieMate will give you that theater level of immersion for far less than much smaller images using other technologies. All you have to do is keep in mind that it works best in a dark room, and really can't handle more than a very small amount of ambient light. The big screens can handle a lot more light, and plasmas, more still.

I only hooked the MovieMate up briefly to cable, but did watch about 15 minutes of some NBA basketball, and about five minutes of DiscoveryHD channel. I certainly would rather have the MovieMate for that game, than watch some tiny 50" big screen TV. And DiscoveryHD was also very impressive. Of course the MovieMate isn't true HD, but with the same resolution as DVD, it is still a magnitude better than conventional television viewing.

Getting back to the all-in-one concept, the MovieMate is so easy to use, that a regular TV with separate DVD player starts looking complicated. For movie watching you should be able to take the MovieMate 25 out of its box brand new, plug it in, focus it onto the screen or wall, and start watching a movie within a couple of minutes. You don't even have to figure out how to hook up a DVD player. Want to watch TV? Easy, run a single S-video or composite video, from your cable box or satellite dish, and you have video. For audio, you could run the audio through your existing stereo our surround sound, or run a second cable from the cable box or satellite, to the Moviemate.Hooking up a game machine like X-Box or Playstation, same process as cable or satellite. A single cable for the video.

It couldn't be easier. And it is small enough and light enough to move quickly from room to room, or take to a friends house, or even with you on vacation!