My neighbor Mac hosts an annual Oktoberfest Party at his house every year, it’s a blast, with authentic food and drink. Plus, he looks pretty darn good in his lederhosen.
As the parents partake in lots of German foods and beer, Mac borrows another neighbor’s giant inflatable screen and a projector to entertain the kids. This is where things usually go South. While the screen pops right up, getting the projector to interface with Mac’s iPhone, iPad or Mac and then to an external speaker ends up in a time-consuming, multi-step, multi-wire process.
As with most consumer projectors, it’s a part of the deal that setting up the interface can be a struggle. Something generally gets sacrificed: great image, bad sound. A common problem is a projector with limited interface to the many different operating systems, gaming systems and smart phones.
Next year I will be bringing the Nomvdic X300 Outdoor Portable Projector to Mac’s house to help keep his party going.
A Big Improvement In Portable Projectors
At first glance, the Nomvdic X300 looks different from the other projectors in this price range – about $700. That’s because the speakers aren’t hidden away but featured right up front. Dual 16 watt portable Harman/Kardon speakers provide crystal clear sound with more power, clarity, and precision than any other projector we tested. The dual sets of tweeters and woofers powered by a 30 watt Class-D amplifier pack a punch for vibrant treble, balanced mids, and deep bass. That alone tells you Nomvdic is out to make some noise in the portable speaker space, with high quality immersive sound.
Beyond the high-quality sound there’s an easy to use 1080P projector tucked away at top of the unit. Simply a flip on the reflective mirror enables customizable projection angles and instantly projects your movie onto a wall, a screen, or even the ceiling. While no portable projectors in this price range work great in low light, the advanced cutting-edge LED technology delivers 1080p FHD native resolution with 125% Rec.709. The projector’s 110-inch big screen, combined with 90-degree reflective mirror projection, allows you to enjoy movies, games, sports, and streaming content with fantastic adjustable viewing angles. No longer is a tripod needed.
Being a highly paid tech writer, I have access to some pretty cool stuff and love my home theater with all its amazing tech stuff. That said, having the ability to simply put the Nomvdic X300 in my son’s room, project the 110-inches onto his wall and watch The Rise of Gru while we ate popcorn and hung out was fantastic and most important, easy.
Easy to Connect
The ultra-fast 5Ghz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth let you cast or screen-mirror content on the big screen from any of your devices, cable-free. What makes the Nomvdic X300 so special is the ease of use. It’s as if their team have watched the struggles to get several kinds of tech to work together in harmony, at Mac’s Oktoberfest parties.
Beyond the Ultra-fast 5Ghz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the many ports in the back of the Nomvdic make easy work of connecting your external devices to the unit and projecting them for your enjoyment- Gaming, smartphones, computers all connect to the different ports to make the integration easy. Forget about messy wires, missing remotes, and frustrating setup. In addition, it can “mirror” video when connecting smartphones via USB-C cable and Wi-Fi and through Bluetooth 4.2, it can not only play music from smartphones, but also transmit audio to headphones when playing videos.
It’s a lot of power in a little package: 6.16 pounds and 10.86 x 6.49 x 6.18 inches it makes the Nomvdic easy to take outside, on a trip, to the office for a presentation. The built-in 10,000mAh battery, offers the longest lifespan of any battery in the segment, providing about 6 hours of battery for audio and 3 for video content. Which means you don’t have to be tethered to an outlet to enjoy your content. We have used it all over the house as well as outside around the fire to watch a movie in the cold, and the sound and picture quality never let us down.
Classic Retro Design
The thoughtful design of the Nomvdic X300, is another thing that catches the eye, while most portable speakers look like, well, portable speakers, the Nomvdic has a bit of a retro- feel, wrapped in leather and
The NOMVDIC X300 Takes Big-Screen Entertainment Anywhere. Credit: NOMVDIC
trimmed with gold accents, it’s the kind of tech you can leave out on your desk or a shelf and not have it look out of place, it looks like an classic studio amp and not a plastic box.
We do wish the “throw” was a little better. A projector’s throw distance is the distance between the projector and the image on the screen. Ultra-short throw projectors usually require a larger optical engine. This kind of engine is difficult to fit in a small-sized projector. However, NOMVDIC plans to release a compact ultra-short throw projector later this year. It’s not meant to fill a theater screen, but no projector in this class is.
It elevates the expectations of what a portable speaker/projector should be capable of. For the price, about $700 this is a best in class. The Nomvdic X300 is a well thought out piece of innovation and tech that lives up to the marketing hype.
