MovieMate 60 Projector: Performance, HDTV and Sports

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Art Feierman

The MovieMate 60 is actually brighter in its best (and dimmest) mode, than most home theater projectors can do at their brightest. Put it in Livingroom mode and its brighter still. There's also Dynamic mode, but the color is better in Livingroom mode, and Dynamic isn't that much brighter. Overall, color is very good, and the picture has a good deal of "pop and wow".

In other words, it's a great, inexpensive projector for sports viewing!

❮ ❯

In the two images above, you see the back, and the front, of our "testing" room. Each has a pair of 65 watt recessed lights (CFLs - dimmables). You can see in the second image, that even with a bright projector like the MovieMate 60, having a pair of bright lights only a couple feet from the screen, takes a definite toll. For the images below, only the rear two lights were on - nice controlled lighting, and the picture looked great.

Below, taken with both pairs of room lights on. The first image, is in Theatre mode. The image below it, was taken in the much brighter Livingroom mode, which has far less trouble handling a lot of ambient light.

Considering all the room light, these images arn't bad at all! Lots of lumens for handling a fair amount of ambient light make the MovieMate 60 a lot of fun for sports and TV. The downside is the relatively low resolution compared to today's 1080p projectors and even the 720p models. On the bright side, resolution isn't really all that low, considering it's higher than a standard DVDs.