JMGO’s N3 Ultimate projector is the new portable 4K champ

Sorry Anchor: JMGO now makes my favorite flagship portable projector.

The N3 Ultimate is an excellent portable 4K projector that beats moderate ambient light at critical placement angles and can rival more expensive home theater installations at night. After a few weeks of testing, I think the raw customizability demonstrated by JMGO’s N3 Ultimate justifies its current $2,399 price ($500 off its $2,999 list).

Modern all-in-one projectors with Google TV built in are already super friendly when it comes to placement. Place one on a living room table or a campsite rock and it will begin searching for a screen or blank wall that is properly aligned, avoiding obstacles to project a focused, color-correct image. But these techniques typically resort to digital optimization that reduces image brightness, resolution, and responsiveness. To avoid this, it is always best to place the projector directly in front of the projection surface.

JMGO’s N3 Ultimate projector promises “lossless placement” by being mounted on a motorized gimbal that rotates horizontally and vertically. This, combined with the optical zoom and generous lens shift, increases off-center placement flexibility without resorting to digital trickery. You can drag the image, Wiimote-style, exactly where you want it using the included remote control. convenient!

However, the N3 Ultimate doesn’t live up to all of its marketing hype. It’s billed as a 5800 ISO lumen projector, which I’ll explain later is why in its brightest mode I didn’t find it worth looking at. In the modes you can actually use, you’re getting about 4,600 ISO lumens, which drops to 3,000 ISO lumens if you want more accurate colors – which is noticeably brighter than Anker’s Nebula X1 flagship 4K portable running in a comparable mode.

Even if the N3 Ultimate misses the advertised range, its class-leading brightness and impressive picture could make it a television replacement for some people.

The first specification I look at on a portable projector is the lumen rating. If the number is listed as anything other than ANSI or ISO, I assume they are lying. JMGO isn’t exactly lying with its 5800 ISO lumen spec, but it isn’t completely transparent either.

Running in Dynamic mode the N3 Ultimate comes close to hitting that incredibly bright mark (I measured around 5,200 ISO lumens), which turns colors hideously green and causes the cooling fans to roar. The colors produced by this triple-laser RGB DLP projector are most accurate in movie mode, but at about half the advertised brightness.

Out of the box, I found the colors and tones produced by the N3 Ultimate’s factory tuning to be more true to life than many projectors in this category. Typically, I select Vivid during the day and then switch to Movie mode in a dark room. Sometimes I would forget because the differences were not always obvious. The brightness of the projector allows its Dolby Vision support to meaningfully improve picture quality in both dark and less dark rooms.

I spent several hours testing the N3 Ultimate on displays as large as 110 inches and as small as 32 inches; On the painted walls, a glossy tabletop, a matte-white screen that increases intensity, and a gray ambient light rejecting (ALR) screen that increases contrast. It adapted admirably to each scenario with little intervention.

Usually the projector played slowly – I had to strain to hear it. In warm rooms and with adaptive brightness on, I could hear the fans kicking up from their normal 26 dB to about 30 dB at a distance of a meter. At maximum brightness, the fans reached an extremely distracting 50dB.

Customizing image placement is a little difficult at first due to all the menu options and details that aren’t exactly consumer friendly. Luckily, there’s a customizable button on the remote that takes the guesswork out. Hold it down and you can drag the projected image around the room to center it wherever you want. Double-click the button and you’ll be presented with four menus that guide you through image-tuning options for lossless lens shift, gimbal motion, zoom, and rotate. It’s very well done and makes it quick and easy to set up the projector in new locations.

The sound is good for a portable all-in-one of this size. It is essentially an Anchor Nebula. However, without those satellites, Anchor and JMGO sound almost identical. The N3 Ultimate produced clear, detailed, room-filling sound with a respectable amount of bass. So, it’s a shame that JMGO doesn’t make it easy to quickly switch the projector into Bluetooth speaker mode from the shutdown screen like many portables do – instead, you have to clumsily enable it via the Settings menu.

The N3 Ultimate plays Netflix out of the box and menu navigation is fast – two things you can’t take for granted with a portable Google TV projector. The one thing that’s missing is an integrated handle, which would make it two-handed portable. Luckily, JMGO ships the N3 Ultimate inside a reusable carrying case that comes in handy when transporting by car.

I also found the projector’s automatic eye protection feature to be poor. Even at the default sensitivity, it may be triggered for no reason. What’s worse is that the eyeballs are slow to respond when they are actually in danger from the laser optics. And other than an on/off button, the N3 Ultimate lacks on-device controls – don’t lose the remote!

“Ultimate” is a dangerously high bar to set when naming your projector, but the JMGO gets close to the mark. If audio quality is your top priority, Anker’s hefty Nebula But if you’re looking for class-leading brightness and unmatched physical placement flexibility from a 4K all-in-one projector, the JMGO N3 Ultimate at $2,399 is the one for you.

Photography by Thomas Ricker/The Verge