NEBULA Mars 3 Air GTV Projector

We bought this to do backyard movies and television. We live in a garden home neighborhood, which means we’re close to our neighbors and their lights and have plenty of streetlights and other light pollution. Even with all that, once the sun sets, this projector does a fabulous job. We often have the fire pit going or the lights on in the gazebo, and there’s still a great clear picture. The only time you really need a truly dark environment is with shows or movies that have a very dark ambience– for some episodes of the Mandalorian, for example, we needed to kill the gazebo lights to see it well. Finding Nemo did not need such considerations. We do typically run the projector in the brighter mode since we have the ability to run power to it in our backyard. We have tested it on battery power and got about 2 hours of viewing. Even on battery power, there’s plenty of brightness in the picture if you’re using it after dark.

I highly recommend setting up all your accounts in the projector ahead of time. It makes it SO much easier to deal with logging into all the accounts and typing in your passwords if you’re just shining it on the wall in your living room the night before movie night instead of trying to set everything up while everyone stares at you! Some of those apps are a pain to navigate, and there’s a bit of a learning curve to using the remote and/or phone app. You get used to it, but it takes a minute.

Our setup:

We project onto a projector screen (just the 100″ Amazon Basic one)– we attached projector screen mounting brackets with to our house under the eaves and attached a set of carabiners rated for 75 pounds (extreme overkill) on each end of the projector screen. My husband can pull the screen out from the storage closet and clip the it onto the hooks in the mounting brackets in less than a minute. We have a set of ground anchors near the wall, and we use two bungee cords (I used a pair of pliers to widen the hooks a bit) so that they loop around the bottom ends of the projector screen and then connect to the anchors. They’re long enough that they only have a tiny bit of tension on the screen– just enough to keep the screen from blowing, twisting, and kinking if there’s a breeze.

When we’re not using the screen, we disconnect the bungees and roll it up, where it’s safely tucked away under the eaves. We leave it up during good weather but can easily unhook it and put it away if rain threatens.

We paired our projector with a cheap tripod from Walmart and a couple orange traffic cones from Home Depot so that the kids don’t run into the tripod in the dark. Like some others have commented, the tripod mounting hole is a little shallow, so it can make the projector feel unstable on a tripod mount. Thanks to those commenters, I anticipated having the same problem and was armed with supplies to solve it. We bought a couple neoprene washers from Home Depot and placed them between the projector and the tripod mount. That made it a snug fit and eliminated any wobble. We leave the tripod mount attached all the time and just store the whole unit in its bag. (It does NOT come with any kind of storage bag, by the way– we ordered the Anker one off Amazon because I disliked having to put it back in the cardboard box each time we used it.)

We often sit back a good ways from the projector, and while the built-in sound is fine for me, my husband is kind of hard of hearing. We pair the projector via Bluetooth with an Anker Soundcore Flare 2 speaker we already owned and sit the speaker right next to us. They play together fabulously. There’s no sound lag at all, at least none I can discern. We did discover that it helps to turn the speaker on a few seconds before turning the projector on. They pair quicker and more easily when the speaker is turned on first. And as we already have an actual bluetooth speaker, we’ve never really tried to use our projector as a bluetooth speaker. The Soundcore Flare 2 is a lot cheaper and more durable if my kids get a little too crazy with their elementary dance parties.

We’ve had this thing for going on three months and love it. I did a lot of research and agonized over which portable projector to buy, and I’m really happy with the choice I made for my family. If that changes, I’ll update this review, but I don’t suspect I’ll need to.

I was looking for a budget-friendly portable projector for a few months. After looking into some reviews, I decided to buy NEBULA Mars 3 Air. However, it’s not as portable as other capsule variants. But it didn’t disappoint me at all with around a $500 budget!

It has everything I need, like 400 ANSI-Lumen Brightness which is decent enough for even a not-so-dark room, 1080P resolution, and most importantly awesome auto focus feature. Also, the sound is pretty good, except for some Netflix movies. Highly recommended.

Easy to use, all kids love it