Small In All Ways.

Up for review today we’ll be taking a look at the Wemax Go basic mini projector, the latest project from projector company Wemax. Featuring an ALPD source with “300” ANSI lumen brightness, 15”-100” screen support, 1x 0.8W speaker, Android/iOS casting support, and 960x540 resolution, the Wemax Go features some modest specs for a semi-modest $349.99 price on their Indiegogo page. But is it worth it? 

The first thing we’ll take a look at is what you get in the box. This review will cover both the Wemax Go and the 50” “Advanced ALR Screen”, but we’ll take a look at the projector mainly since the screen is…well, just a screen. In the box you’ll find a nice carrying case, which houses the projector itself, some manuals, a USB-C cable, and a 30W capable power brick to power the device. Size-wise, the Wemax Go is pretty compact, measuring at only 6inx3.5inx1in (15cm x 9cm x 2.5cm) and weighing a whopping .66lb (~300g), which makes it quite a small little thing all things considered. On top of the projector you’ll find four directional buttons, back, and OK buttons to navigate the built-in menus, and on the back you get a USB-C port for power, full sized HDMI port, USB port, and a 3.5mm jack for audio out which is a nice touch as while the projector does include a built-in speaker, it’s only mono and is a measly 0.8W. The front of the projector has a nice lens cover, for when you’re not using the device, and the side includes a manual focus wheel. The Wemax Go is also wifi-capable, but this is basically only for the casting side of things…which doesn’t work too well, thanks to being limited to 2.4ghz. As for the screen, it appears to be a fairly simple 50” projector screen that pops up and can be mounted via hooks on each side. It does feel quite quality, though, so that’s good. 

The built-in menu on the projector is fairly basic and has four main selections at the bottom: Movie, Photo, Music, and Text. Presumably the projector is able to pull all of this media from the included USB port, however I was never able to figure out what exact format the USB has to be in, and what media formats the projector accepts. I tried NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, MP4, MKVs in a variety of video formats, even AVI, but the menu would never show any of the media included on my USB drive so I just sort of gave up with that function. I was told this is a pre-production unit, and the software is still in its beta stages, so this may all be fixed by the time the device launches off Indiegogo. At the top of the page, you get basic settings, HDMI, wifi settings, and the Android/iOS casting feature mentioned above. Settings-wise you’re not getting a whole lot, with just some basic picture quality and audio settings to tinker with, but that’s all fine enough for something like this. As for casting, as noted above because the wifi chip in the Wemax Go is limited to 2.4ghz only and seemingly low speed, your mileage is going to vary depending on what you’re going to be casting. I was able to cast from my phone and my laptop, but for some reason casting from my wife’s iPad/iPhone…wouldn’t work at all, as the projector just wasn’t being seen at all by either. 

All in all, it’s all just basic, cheap projector kind of stuff. Low-end speakers, slow wifi that only just works, and basic software that sort of doesn’t work for some things but isn’t wholly necessary for a projector. But the real question is, how’s the picture quality? The real answer? Not great. The low resolution combined with a fairly low color contrast results in less than ideal picture quality, which is very noticeable up close and tolerable at best from a distance. Even using the screen they provided, which is fairly decent, you’re only going to get mediocre quality at best. That blurriness in the photo above? That’s not a bad camera or poor projector focus, that’s just what it looks like in person when something is actually on the screen. The auto-vertical keystone feature also can never seem to decide on how exactly it wants to correct, even when the projector and what it’s projecting against is sitting on a solid surface completely still! For $349.99, or even higher if the “pre-retail” price truly is $598.99 as per the Indiegogo page, you’d be much better off either buying something bigger and much higher quality, or skip the projector altogether and pick up a cheapo 70” TV with guaranteed better picture quality than this.