3M MPro-150 review page 2

The MPro-150 vs the MPro-120

The MPro-150 looks very much like the MPro-120, and the projector is quite similar. The only difference is that the MPro-150 is brighter (15 lumens vs 12 lumens). I have to say that putting them one against the other, it's hard to notice which one is the brighter one (by the way, the way we perceive lumens of brightness is logarithmic, and the difference between 15 and 12 is small indeed!). In the following photos, the 150 is on top:

You can see that the image of the MPro-120 is more "square", but that's only because I placed them both side by side, and the the MPro-150 is projecting upwards (i.e. not straight).

The MPro-150 vs the AAXA L1 laser projector

Here's a more interesting comparison: how the MPro-150 fares against the AAXA L1 laser projector. Beside being smaller as we've seen before, the L1 is brighter (20 lumens), has a better resolution (800x600). It's a laser projector which means that it's always in focus. It also means that it suffers from Speckle. The L1 costs $599, and here's our review.

Obviously being focus-free is terrific, there's no doubt about that. When we compare images the L1 seems more 'colorful', but it actually it has too much Green color in all images. This is annoying. Personally I prefer the MPro-150 image, especially as I really dislike Speckle. Both projectors has roughly the same image size from the same distance. In the following photo, the L1 is on top (again, please disregard the fact that the image is not square, it's just the way I positioned it):

Next I tested both with the same powerpoint file. The MPro-150 colors are again more true-to-life (the white is white, while on the L1 it's a bit greenish). The fonts are more smooth on the MPro-150 but are a bit more fuzzy, too, which I think has more to do with the viewing software. In fact, the L1 has some serious formatting issues, the spacing between the letters is not even. On the other hand, the MPro-150, for some reason, did not show the photo that is part of the presentation on the top-right. In the following photos, again, the MPro-150 is the bottom image, and please disregard the trapezoid shape of the L1 image:

Here's a movie comparing those two projectors:

Conclusions

To summarize this review:

• The MPro-150 is a great pico-projector, the best of all those we tested so far. Very high build-quality, good image quality and a nice set of features. The internal-memory (and micro-SD) card is a great step forward.
• The menu system is easy to use (even though there's no manual), but playback options are very limited in movies and documents.
• Viewing documents or spreadsheets with small fonts is a problem, and the 640x480 resolution is simply not enough, you just have to zoom-in.

For most people, I really recommend this projector, at least from all those we reviewed (The MPro-120, Ray projector and the AAXA L1). If you do not need the internal memory, then the Ray Projector is smaller and much cheaper. If you have the money, and need to display small fonts and want a really small projector, then go for the L1. You'll get a sharp laser focus-free image but you'll alos get Speckle and over-green images.

back to page 1 of this review