If you kept up with the numerous product announcements at this year’s CES, you probably caught a glimpse of LG’s portable projector, which boasts the ability to beam 4K images to your wall up to 120 inches. Yes, it’s expensive and, yes, it’s very limited compared to to more traditional home projectors, but the allure of that portability has left quite a few people excited at the prospect of getting one. If you’re among those folks, you don’t have to wait long, as the LG Cinebeam Q has just gone up for preorder.
To the unfamiliar, LG’s portable projector comes in a boxy but compact frame that measures just 5.6 x 5.5 x 3.25 inches (depth x height x width), making it small enough to fit on most tables and shelves in your home. No, it’s not the kind of portable projector you can use to watch movies in the park, since there’s no internal battery, requiring you to plug it into a power source. For use as a projector all around the house where you can get easy access to power outlets, though, it definitely does the trick.
The LG Cinebeam Q can project displays at 4K UHD resolution (3,840 x 2,160 pixels), so you can enjoy sharp images even at bigger sizes. Maximum screen size is 120 inches, although you’ll need to move it 10.5 feet away from the projection surface to create an image that big. Do note, this is still a small projector, so the bigger the screen, the less-stellar the image quality will get, so despite being capable of large screen sizes, it probably works best at sizes closer to modern TVs. When setting down on a surface by the way, you can rotate the device’s handle to the bottom to tilt the projector upwards and put the beamed image higher up on the projection surface. It’s a clever touch.
Brightness, by the way, tops out at just 500 lumens, so you’ll definitely want to use it with minimal light in the room, especially if you want good-looking colors at larger screen sizes. Other picture details include a 450,000:1 contrast ratio, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and 154 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. It also supports HDR content, with processing for both HDR10 and HLG.
The LG Cinebeam Q handles image correction all on its own, so the display will always be correctly aligned, regardless of the device’s placement, which is very important a projector that’s meant to be used at different places around the house. It runs the same webOS software found in the outfit’s TVs, so you get preloaded apps for various streaming services, including Netflix, Apple TV, Prime Video, and Disney+. It also supports playback of media from other devices, either via Apple AirPlay 2, Android Screen Share, and Miracast, although there’s no Chromecast support. Other features include a three-laser RGB projection system, 3W mono speakers (yeah, you’ll definitely want to use external speakers with these), and an included remote.
The LG Cinebeam Q is now available for preorder up to April 7th. Price is $1,299.