Acer K335 LED Pocket Projector – Performance

Acer K335 Projector – Brightness

The Acer K335  is rated at 1000 lumens, which is well above the lumens rating of the typical LED pocket/portable projector.  All measurements were taken with the projector displaying an 81” wide image with the projector about 9.5 feet from the screen.  Consistent with other reviews, our measurements were taken at the brightest point of the image (usually near the center bottom of the image).

Selecting the ‘Bright’ picture mode (the brightest), we measured a maximum of 668 lumens, about 33% less than advertised.  Using ‘Sports’ mode, the output dropped to 406 lumens.  Next, ‘Standard’ mode dropped slightly to 387 lumens with ‘Game’ essentially the equivalent at 377 lumens.  All of the above modes have the “Brilliant Color” feature, found on may DLP single chip projectors, turned on by default.  ‘Movie’ and ‘Dark Cinema’ modes, which were similar in appearance, also were nearly identical in lumens output at 358 and 366 lumens respectively.  For those picture modes where ‘Brilliant Color’ was used by default, turning this feature off reduced the light output significantly.  Impacted the greatest was ‘Bright’ mode which dropped from 668 lumens with ‘Brilliant Color’ turned on to only 262 lumens with it turned off.  The ‘Movie’ and ‘Dark Cinema’ modes have ‘Brilliant Color’ not only turned off by default, but this feature is not available in these mode (I assume because these mode are intended to have more accurate colors).

Somewhat unusual for a mini projector, the K335 has an Eco lamp mode.  Using the “Eco” mode reduced the light output by about  15% (measured in ‘Bright’ mode).

Mini projectors can often have issues with brightness uniformity, resulting in a noticeable drop in brightness from the center of the displayed image to the edges.  The K335 performance was fairly good in this regard.  The uniformity of the image brightness was measured with the projector operating in ‘standard’ mode.  The maximum light drop off was measured at the top left corner of the image where there was 28% fall-off was measure relative to the center of the image.  The other 3 corners of the image showed less brightness fall-off, with a average of about 20%.