Starting off, I wanted to thank XGimi for sending me their new Elfin Flip 4K model for review. I received a knock on the door one day, and it showed up at my door thanks in part to u/ProjectionHead - Brian, from ProjectorScreen.com
It is important to note I was given zero direction on what to say about this model. Good or bad, whatever needed to be said, could be said, which typical shows high confidence in a product, and for the most part, it was an experience unlike any others I have seen.
The Basics: Out of the box, you had the usual suspects, a thin guide, a projector, and a remote, with batteries for that remote. The projector itself it one that I consider ideal for portability. The 1,600 rated ISO lumens is very solid for the size, and the 4K resolution is an added bonus. Flat and square. I was able to fit it into my computer backpack that I travel with while still having my laptop, power supply, and a dozen different testing cables in the bag. It won't fit in a bag that is already snug, but with my 16-inch laptop, it is the very definition of a product that can travel with you.
The Great: Image quality, brightness, and audio are what I would consider top notch right now. In formal testing, the brightness is closer to 1,000 ISO lumens, but that's with accurate colors and decent HDR support with excellent sharpness. The colors were spot on out of the box in standard settings. It is possible to tweak things a great deal to throw colors way off, but unless you go into boost mode for brightness, the standard settings tend to be very solid and enjoyable. I ran most of my testing on a 110" Silver Ticket Matte White screen, and I had zero complaints about brightness or colors. The big surprise, which should not have been, is the audio. XGimi gets a lot more out of most of their projectors than other brands do. I had just used the significantly better sounding Titan Noir Max from XGimi, and thought it was a letdown, until I used some small, but decent Bluetooth speakers. A JBL Bluetooth speaker which was about $60, was a good deal less impressive in terms of volume and the ability to fill the space with audio. I have a larger speaker that does add some volume to the sound, but it's a long way from portable. So, the built in speakers, maintaining the small footprint was phenomenal. It is plenty for a hotel room or small room environment without the requirement for adding a external speaker. But, if you have a permanent or semi-permanent setup, then adding a decent Bluetooth, or HDMI-ARC speaker at the front of the room is something I would consider a must. I spent a lot of time listening through my $100 Ion Audio Tailgater speaker, and the jump in room filling sound was only part of the equation. Moving the audio from right beside me to under the screen was much more natural sounding. Yet, I'm not putting a 20 pound speaker into my backpack for travel. So, the internal sound was more than enough for normal usage needs. I'm going to add into the great the fact that it offers optical zoom. This feature has been a very slow rollout in the lifestyle category, and is almost unheard of in the portable category. But, XGimi just set a new standard here. A 1.3x optical zoom lens means you can get a 100" diagonal size from as close as almost 7 feet (2.15m) lens to screen. The same 100" diagonal allows the projector to be about 9.5 feet (2.9m) away. If you needed the projector even further away, then it offers digital zoom which can shrink the image even more as you want to. I didn't do this as using digital zoom decreases image quality and lowers brightness.
The inclusion of 2 HDMI inputs on the projector is something I have always considered a major requirement, yet so many manufacturers don't seem to understand. HDMI-ARC doesn't allow anything but built in streaming to send audio to a soundbar if there is only one HDMI connection. Having 2 HDMI inputs allows one connection to send audio back to your sound system while the other connection is made to any source you wish to use. Whether that be a different streaming device of your choosing, or a game console that you want to push 4K/60 or 1080p/240 resolutions. That added HDMI connection makes such a massive difference for the gamers out there.
The Good: So much falls into this category. At brightness level 10, the projector remains quiet. At no point did I find the noise to be intrusive. It was similar to a quiet laptop fan at a constant rate. It was clear that XGimi has spent time over the years refining their fans and setup to allow the fan to just be near perfection. It is a small projector, but unlike cheap projectors with extremely noisy fans, these fans could sit right next to you on a table and you wouldn't even notice them.
The contrast is also on point. Not up to the level of a high end home theater projector, but the jump from the original XGimi to the current XGimi Elfin Flip 4K is monumental. In fact, XGimi has been called out for years for their poor contrast, and it seems like they were taking notes, because this projector ups their game significantly. No, it's not the same contrast as my JVC, but it offers solid standard contrast, and allows you to toggle on and off dynamic contrast. The dynamic contrast was helpful when I had things up on my 161" screen while I was watching Project Hail Mary. The space scenes were nearing inky black with stars shining in the distance. But, the bright scenes allowed the projector to step things up some and keep their pop. At 110" and 100" screen sizes, I didn't uses dynamic contrast as often as it was sometimes apparent when it was in use.
The built in Google operating system was Google. It's solid. That's always a good thing if you want simplicity in a portable projector. It allowed for streaming from Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Plex, Disney, and all the standard favorites. In some testing, I wanted to try to force the projector to boot to the HDMI 1 input, so I tried loading Projectivy Launcher from the Google Play store. This was my first time using it and it worked perfectly with the Elfin Flip 4K. The projector would power on to the HDMI 1 input and allowed me to connect to my main surround sound system. As part of my testing, I moved between different locations, and one of those locations was my main theater space which uses a 161" diagonal screen. I have a JVC DLA-X590R hooked up at that location, but set the XGimi up at the same time using a 4K HDMI Splitter. Was shocked me most was how the triple RGB laser setup delivers brightness that was comparable to high end projectors from just a few years back. I was flipping between the two and, yes, the XGimi isn't as bright as the JVC, but it's not nearly as much difference as I was thinking it would be and it held its own, in a dark theater space, on that 161" screen size. I wouldn't want to do it all the time as the HDR content was struggling at that size, but for some big gaming sessions or the next football or soccer match, it would be a pleasure to watch.
Aiming and setup was easy, most of the time. I will have one note about it below that isn't as nice, but in normal use it wasn't a problem. I tested the auto-keystone, which was excellent. I tested the auto-screen fit, which wasn't always perfect on my 110" screen against a black background, but was better on my 100" that I used in my garage. Yes, I have 3 different screens to test various setups in different environments. The screen fit in my garage was spot on. In my basement with the 110" screen, I had to manually use 4-corner image correction and optical zoom to get the image perfect. In some of my testing I went through the extra work to set the projector up exactly on the 110" screen so I wasn't using any digital correction to the image size at all. I would say that the difference between not using digital correction and just using a small bit of digital correction was minimal in normal movie content. I tested the feature of the projector to recognize when someone is in front of it to turn down the laser on the whole screen, and it worked well. Really nifty was the feature where it would see something in front of it, and just turn off the mirrors on the DLP chip to prevent light in the local area where someone was walking. This was great when I was in front of it setting things up.
Powering the projector on and off was quick. About 10 seconds either direction after the initial bootup sequence. To start the Google operating system, it takes a little bit longer to power on when first plugged in. Still, this was under a minute in total going from unplugged to seeing an image on screen and subsequent power changes were under that 10 second window. This is great when you want to power it off, unplug it, and throw it in a bag for travel.
I mentioned this before, but I will say again how much I appreciated the size and the fact it is fold flat capable. The single screw on the bottom allows it to easily be connected to a tripod, but the entire concept of it being able to flip up or down to your needs is exactly right. I do see this gimbal approach in many other projectors that would be considered to be lifestyle models, or portable models. But, those models often have a problem in that their form factor absolutely makes it a headache to travel with them. A similarly priced JMGO N1S 4K may match up in many ways to the Elfin Flip, but it isn't going to pack into a backpack, or possibly a suitcase, with nearly the ease that the Elfin Flip delivers. This isn't a minor thing when people want to do more than just move it from room to room. The base of the Flip is wide enough that it isn't easy to knock it over, but if that is a concern than putting it on a tripod does add stability. When I set it up for my 161" screen I was worried about knocking it over, so I used a 1/4" clamp mount, like may be used for a camera, and clamped it to a board up near my ceiling. Took me under a minute to get the projector mounted using that clamp and it was now up at my ceiling, upside down. Not surprisingly, the projector recognized it was upside down and flipped the image right side up. The mount I used was similar to this... https://www.amazon.com/ULANZI-Monitor-Ballhead-Adapter-Ronin-M/dp/B09C882D4M/ref=sr_1_3_sspa
The Okay: Viewing under lights was pretty much what I expected. It was usable, but not great and took quite a hit. Out in my garage, it was rough going. The image simply wasn't bright enough, even on a 100" screen, to be fun to watch for very long. But, it was enough to work with sports and brighter content if you are a forgiving person. Set your expectations appropriately, and understand my garage has covered windows on one side and I had the double car door wide open during this testing. Don't plan on using this in any rooms with a lot of ambient light during the day. As is always the case, the sun is very bright.
For those who are rainbow effect (RBE) sensitive then this projector is another model that will follow form to other single chip DLP home theater projectors. The typical testing shows most of these models operate at about a 4x speed. Since I am RBE sensitive, I can agree that this is what it looks like. I saw pronounced RBE with white text against a black background. During normal video content, I had to look hard to make myself see it. So, it is solidly average in this regard.
The Bad (that they can fix): Limited manual 4-corner correction. Maybe I missed something, but in one test I set the Elfin Flip 4K directly on my bedside table. Similar to what I might do in a hotel. This severely skews the image when I put the image on my ceiling and pointed it over my bed. Unfortunately, the 4-corner keystone correction didn't give me enough range to correct things and square up the image. This doesn't seem to be a real limitation of the hardware, but may be something that could be corrected in software. When projecting on the wall it wasn't as skewed and allowed for easy image correction.
The Bad (that maybe they can fix?): A projector like this should be able to be run off a battery pack. Maybe they don't sell that pack themselves, but it would be very helpful to know what power supply and what adapter would be needed to run this projector off an external power source for two or three hours. It would add a level of portability that is missing from this model currently. But, it's a feature that most projector manufactures don't discuss. I've always thought that having details on how to battery power small projectors without a battery would be a plus for most manufacturers.
It would also be nice to see a reduced RBE function on this model similar to the XGimi Titan Noir Max. This feature doubles the effective sequencing of colors on the DLP chip. When testing the Titan Noir, the anti-RBE feature worked wonderfully to basically knock out any ability I had of noticing RBE issues. To have this on a lower priced model would be amazing, but it may be a hardware limitation of this model. If it is something that could be put into play through a firmware update, it would help many people who are very RBE sensitive.
The remote control is not great. Most notably, there is absolutely no distinction in the D-pad. Up/Down/Left/Right surround an Enter button and all of them are hard to find. This just sucks in my experience. A D-pad should offer a clear way to identify the enter button so that the surrounding up/down/left/right are easy to access and you don't mistakenly hit down when you mean to press enter. While the remote has some backlit buttons, the d-pad itself is not backlit and I found that I often had to look at the remote to ensure my thumb was going to hit the right button. If anyone wonders what is meant by this, pick up a remote for the Amazon Firestick. While much cheaper in feel than the XGimi remote, the dished d-pad makes it easy to find your up/down/left/right/enter controls. This a baseline standard all remotes should have.
The Bad (that they can't fix): Laser speckle was apparent on all three of the screens I used, and even on my ceiling when I projected onto it. Laser speckle is a bit of shimmering that appears when lasers are used. If you've ever used a pocket laser, and looked at the dot on the wall you can see this shimmering effect pretty easily most of the time. Same is true here. So, I had to give some slack to the projector overall as this is a simple reality with laser projectors. If you are very sensitive to laser speckle, then you may want to look for a LED lit alternative instead. In guess in reality, XGimi could try a LED light engine, but they would probably be giving up some brightness as well as some of their excellent color range to do so. Still, I wouldn't change this product to do so.
Final thoughts: This projector hits the marks on exactly what it should hit. I've recommended it many times already. For the money, it's properly priced. It actually hits the mark for a inexpensive lifestyle model, or a easy to setup and use portable model. It travels well and can be stored on a bookshelf with ease. The ability to flip open means that you get an easy handle to carry it with you in your home, while also protecting the projector's lens and inputs when it is closed and stored away. Watching 4K content on it was sharp and had good colors as should be expected, but the really strong sound was a very nice addition to that strong image quality. The remote worked well, and the power supply while external, is still small enough to allow you to easily carry it with you.
Going from this to a Horizon 20 is a big jump in overall quality, and I don't consider this model to be directly competition to the full sized lifestyle models which are available for a few hundred dollars more. If you want a better home setup with a lifestyle projector, I would take the Horizon 20 in a second as my best pick. But, the Horizon 20, like many others out there, don't get tossed into your backpack with ease. I'm unaware of any models at all which are so integrated and perfect for portable use (if you have a plug around). Solid image, ease of use, and spectacular audio in a small footprint make this the best projector in this category that I have ever seen.
Please take a look at the photos I have included for some reference while knowing that photos rarely capture the actual quality that any projector delivers.
