The Apeman LC350 is a very affordable projector, one which is ideal for a range of obvious uses such as game playing, watching movies, and perhaps the less obvious use of creating your own home planetarium.
Home Projector
Before we get onto my experiment let’s first cover the projector itself. It’s a really nice looking bit of kit, a matt white finish with control buttons on the top for controlling the inbuilt menu system and input selector.
You can put in a memory card, USB stick, connect via HDMI, AV or VGA. HDMI will be the most obvious route to projecting, pop a fire stick in and you immediately have a brilliant content streaming/projecting setup.
It has a focus ring and keystone adjustment ring (to help correct slanted video when projecting at an angle).
On the bottom is an adjustable leg for when this is placed on a flat surface. Alternatively, there is a standard tripod mount, plus the ability to flip the projected image, so you could wall/ceiling mount this if desired.
Setup was very simple, just plug in the power, set the projector on a flat surface, the further away from the wall the larger the image, and connect a source.
Best used in the dark
This isn’t going to be a projector you use in daylight, it’s not powerful enough to overcome natural light and you end up with a washed out image. The brighter the ambiant light the more washed out the image.
Wait until it goes dark and the image becomes much better, you essentially get a solid screen projected onto your wall.
During tests the projector was placed around 3.5m from a large white wall. The wall doesn’t have anything on it which meant an additional projector screen wasn’t required, the image could be projected directly onto the wall.
The projected image is 720p, and considering this resolution it’s a decent enough picture. Close up you can see the low resolution, but who sits close to a projection? You sit back and enjoy the large expansive view.
Picture quality is good, I tried this with the Amazon Firestick, loading up the excellent Picard series and it looked impressive. The picture filled my entire wall and gave me a cinema-like experience.
The projector does have a somewhat noisy fan, especially noticeable during quiet moments. If watching something on your own I’d recommend using a set of decent headphone to give you a brilliant audio/visual experience. Otherwise, you’re best off getting a decent speaker system.
So for movies and games this works brilliantly, but then I had an idea. I’ve reviewed various planetariums such as the Flux and DS-1 and a question I often get asked is can you whizz around the stars. With a home planetarium, this isn’t possible, it’s just a fixed projection, but if you have a projector and laptop you suddenly have some interesting possibilities.
Are Mini LED Projectors Like the DBPOWER BL-18 Comparable to the Apeman LC350?
Yes, Mini LED projectors like the DBPOWER BL-18 are comparable to the Apeman LC350. Both offer high-quality projection and portability, making them ideal for home entertainment or on-the-go use. The DBPOWER BL-18 mini projector stands out for its impressive brightness and sharp image quality, making it a popular choice for many consumers.
Apeman LC350 as a planetarium
The idea was simple, hook up a laptop to the LC350, download some planetarium software and see if it all comes together.
When researching planetarium software I found there are a number of free options available. The software used was Celestia, available for free via httpss://celestia.space/. I’ve no reason to think its better or worse than any others, it just happened to look good and had a demo trip around the solar system for me to film.
You can see the end result in the following video, but for those who are itching to find out if it worked well…yes it did! It was a very different experience to home planetariums, instead of looking up at the night sky you were up in the night sky.
For those looking to experiment with home cinema, perhaps you have a kids room you want to turn into a little cinema for movies and gaming, the Apeman LC350 is a brilliant starter projector.
