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Boxlight BumbleBee LED/DLP Portable Projector Review: Image Quality

Posted on September 30, 2013 by Art Feierman

BumbleBee Projector Color Handling

The color handling of the BumbleBee is most similar to the Mitsubishi PK20. Both actually exhibit better handling of reds and yellows than many, larger, brighter DLP business projectors. That said, the weakness of the BumbleBee, is in its brightness, which demands a dark room.

BumbleBee Projector Color Handling

As seen in the image here, reds and yellows are handled pretty well by the Boxlight BumbleBee.

Within the limits of the BumbleBee's brightness, the projector does a very respectable job for presentations. Of course, the limited brightness requires a room that is very close to fully darkened, and screen sizes should be limited to no more than 60" diagonal, even with the very low lighting. Forty to fifty inch diagonal is probably a better recommendation that pushing out to about 60 inches.

Feeding the BumbleBee a DVD video source produced a very reasonable looking image (Gandalf, below, from Lord of the Rings). The Bumblebee cannot match a home theater projector, in terms of color accuracy, nor black levels, and, for that matter isn't particularly close, but, that's not so say that you can't enjoy watching a movie on a smaller screen, relying on the Bumblebee, and perhaps its battery pack, far, far, away from the nearest AC power outlet.

Evenness of color across the entire screen is pretty consistant, and not an issue.

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Boxlight BumbleBee Clarity and Sharpness

With a native resolution of 800x600, the BumbleBee produces a nice sharp image when fed SVGA (800x600), as shown immediately below.

Feeding the BumbleBee the more common XGA resolution signals (below), the compression technology of the BumbleBee, is about typical for SVGA projectors.

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Smaller type is soft, but readable from XGA sources, on siz es down to 8 point type (barely) on an XGA source (10 is easier to read, for sure). The image above shows the Bumblebee handling an even higher resolution, 1280x800, from my MacBook Pro.

Boxlight BumbleBee Projector Menus

Boxlight BumbleBee Projector Menus

BumbleBee Menu Color

While the BumbleBee and Mitsubishi PK20 may be siblings from a hardware standpoint, they have markedly different menu designs.

The Boxlight Bumblebee starts with its Color menu (shown here). The Color menu has the standard goodies - Brightness, Contrast, Gamma, and preset modes (called Brightness modes), as well as color saturation, and where active, Tint.

Gamma

In addition there is a color temperature control, and separate color controls for Red, Green, and Blue.

The Gamma mode lets you select between Enhanced, PC, Movie, and Photo modes.

The next main menu is the Image menu.

Aspect Ratio

The Image menu provides control for vertical keystone correction, selection of aspect ratios, and Sharpness.

In addition, for locking in a PC signal, The Boxlight BumbleBee projector image menu.there are also Horizontal and Vertical Position controls, and a tracking control.

Management

The Management Menu, lets the user select orientation (Ceiling or table, front or rear projection), provides the option of Source lock (always looks for the last input, or scans all inputs looking for an active one). There is also a lamp hour The Boxlight BumbleBee projector management menu.counter, and the Battery level gauge.

Lastly, the Management Menu offers a Reset control.

AV Setup

The last menu we will look at, is labeled the AV Setup menu.

The AV Setup menu primarily relates to utilizing the SD card slot on the BumbleBee.

This menu lets you define a slideshow, including thumbnail previews, auto or manual advance, timer (for showing images), The Boxlight BumbleBee projector AV setup menu.and special effects between images, such as wipes, blinds, dissolves, and so on.

Boxlight BumbleBee Projector - Remote Control

The Bumblebee comes with a remote shaped the same as the Mitsubishi PK20's. There is one additional button on the BumbleBee's remote control, and the order of the buttons is slightly different. The additional button, however, relates to keystone correction. The BumbleBee remote has two buttons for controlling keystone correction, whereas the PK20 has one, then you control keystone with the arrow keys.

The remote worked well enough The manual says the range is 16 feet, and I definitely had no problem using it up to that distance, getting a decent bounce off of my screen, when needed.

As you can see, there is a power button on the top left. Next come the four arrow keys in a circle configuration, with a center Enter button.

Additional buttons: The two keystone buttons, Hi-Bright button, Computer, Video, Blank, Still, Aspect ratio, and finally, the Auto (setup) button

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