When I was young, it was neat to see a friend of the family’s house have a mini movie theater inside their house (not to mention it was the first time I played Super Mario Bros on an NES!)

In 2024, I was given an opportunity to evaluate a WiMiUs P62 home projector and wrote this review:

I honestly didn't think our home was big enough to justify a projector and the more I thought about it and stared at the rectangular space in front of my bed, the more I realized this would be a wonderful solution to watch movies and not be constrained by the 27" monitor I have at my computer desktop and be in the comforts of my own bed instead of sitting in a desk chair. I'm also one of those people who doesn’t mind watching a movie on my smartphone, on occasion, and, in the past, bought a smartphone arm to make the experience better but the arm eventually broke so I haven't done this since 2016. Using this projector is a HUGE and welcome upgrade to watching movies in my room!

When I got the unit, I was really impressed it came in a cute backpack carrying case! Back in 2000, I was running around the city with heavy gigantic projectors (and 2-3kg laptops!) - that killed my shoulder and back for sure. So to witness this little guy come in at 1.82 kg and be as bright and practical is nothing short but amazing with today's tech. Fully loaded (projector, case, instruction booklet, cables, accessories) the backpack weighs 2.5 kg.

The first thing I needed to do is figure out how to prop the unit up. If you have a stand or a ceiling mount, you can remove the rubber feet and reveal four M5 mounting holes (one on each corner). In my case, it was straightforward to put the projector on a table and raise the front using the center front stand adjustment (1.5 inches max) and then prop it up further on a small box to get it to the right height:

For my purposes, this is perfect, we’re not opening up a movie theater here :)

There are two HDMI ports on the back and I put an ole skool Chromecast (the original!) in the first port and a Roku Streaming Stick 4k in the 2nd port. I was happy the 2 USB ports are able to power both streaming devices without having to plug either of them into the wall:

I find myself using the Roku more often because it has a physical remote (image is downscaled to 1080p, more on this later). Apps like YouTube make it easy to cast to the Chromecast device without having to mirror your device.

There is an input button on the remote (which takes 2 AAA batteries that aren't included so be sure to get a pair) and it expects you to use the D-pad to change inputs and hit OK. This is a bit of a nitpick but I personally would prefer pushing the input button repeatedly to change inputs like a lot of TVs and monitors (Dell, LG, etc) - I hope the manufacturer is listening and includes this in a future firmware update. I also wish they kept the same button layout of the remote on projector - notice how the OK button is not in the middle (so good luck remembering where it is in the dark!):

I specifically got this unit to test it's "keystone" capability - this is the ability to set the projector at an angle and be able to correct for it and still see a rectangle with the correct dimensions parallel to the edges of the room:

I was so happy it corrected it so perfectly! Provided the unit is level, "auto keystone" works great - it’s like magic! Depending on how severe of an angle you are correcting - you may need to make additional manual adjustments which is easy to fine tune with the UI they provide. That said, I do wish you could assign the current keystone config to the keystone button on the remote. The remote button currently triggers "auto keystone" which can be annoying if you hit the button accidentally - perhaps this could be a setting to configure whether this button does "auto keystone" or “load your last saved config” (or provides a pop up asking you to choose while defaulting to your last saved config)

The image is amazing thrown at 8 feet - after keystone correction, the image is 73x43" - a 85" diagonal. It blew my socks off how bright and vivid the colors are and I am not using a projector screen! In fact, the reason I selected this unit is because of the Star Wars footage I saw in another reviewer video - it looked too good to be true. Projector tech has come a long ways as nothing looks washed out and it succeeds with flying colors (ahem no pun intended) to make you feel like you're at the movies at home! 🍿 Due to keystone correction, you may experience blurriness of text in one corner but in our case, all our text (eg. subtitles) are centered so it didn’t impact our viewing experience:

subtitles in yellow plenty readible

Here’s an intro I felt has a lot of vibrant and contrasting colors and the blacks look pretty black! It already is watchable on the default "normal" (50% brightness setting), it looks best on this "Vivid" setting:

https://youtu.be/N962IwxcKzg?si=ERNfHx0DXnYeGnI7

I did a brief test during broad daylight and it's not something I would recommend. You can see the picture but highly recommend you pull down the shades and darken the room (to be expected)