Yaber's Affordable LED Projector Is A Great Price, But At What Cost?
Yaber Y61 Projector review, low-cost and affordable mini 720p Projector.
Table of Content
Yaber reached out to me and said can you review our projector? I said yes sure why not, so here I am. If you're looking for a mini projector that you can take anywhere you want to go then this might be the one for you.
I'll be detailed as I possibly can be and let you know the truth of my experience. The Y61 projector from Yaber is pretty cheap it's £89 on Amazon UK and $139 on Amazon US, that price does reflect the build quality, it doesn't feel premium at all.
There are a few things that let this projector down but, I'll get into that further later. The Y61 houses stereo speakers and infrared sensors, it comes with an HDMI input, and USB for smartphone mirroring, you can connect headphones or speakers to this projector along with an analogue AV input.
The Hardware
The projector comes with a stand that you can screw into the bottom of the projector which will elevate the projection, you can also mount this to your ceiling but the mount is sold separately.
The physical buttons on the projector itself will help you navigate the on-screen menu and change sources and of course, turn the thing on.
The remote that comes with the projector is pretty small and has the same functions as the hardware buttons on the projector but it's bad quality, the buttons are mushy and there's no real tactile feeling to it and sometimes the wrong buttons register or don't register at all.
To test the projector I plugged in the Xiaomi Mi TV Stick which I'll be reviewing shortly so make sure you subscribe to notifications. I'm gonna put it head-to-head with the Nvidia Shield to see how it stacks up.
"I was surprised at the picture quality"
The projector is fairly easy to set up. I did run into a few problems; adjusting the keystone is done manually by using wheels, you can only adjust the vertical keystone but that's pretty common with budget projectors like this.
I'm not sure if it's just my review unit, but the wheel for the keystone is very loose, so if you played loud music, it will alter the wheel position. Anytime I had to adjust the keystone, I found it quite hard to get the picture focused, the fan is fairly audible, but not too distracting.
The on-screen menus are fairly basic, you can do things like flip the orientation if you're hanging it from a ceiling other than that the picture options are fairly basic. You can adjust it to your own needs, but it doesn't make too much of a difference.
I was surprised at the picture quality, it looks very good although it only outputs 720p, it can take a maximum input of 1080p, and there is some discolouration to the left and right of the picture but it's hardly noticeable when you're watching content.
I'm really happy with the picture quality. I can watch films for hours and hours on this, the last feature I'm going to talk about is the ability to cast your phone screen to the projector, now this worked perfectly fine when I try it on iOS, but I couldn't get it to work when I was using Android, my Google Pixel 3 XL wouldn't work via a cable or Wi-Fi.
My iPhone, on the other hand, works perfectly fine when using a cable - this isn't so much of a big deal because I prefer to use my Xiaomi Mi stick or an Amazon Fire TV stick.
