In a very short amount of time, Anker has upended and basically come to dominate the (cool but decidedly niche) portable projector market. It was only a matter of time, but the company is now turning its sights on legitimate, home theater-quality projectors, and preorders just opened.
The new Nebula Cosmos 1080p and Nebula Cosmos Max are fully featured projectors in every sense of the word, featuring sharper, brighter pictures than their portable siblings, while retaining features that made those smaller projectors so appealing, like built-in Android, excellent speakers, and support for screen mirroring.
The Cosmos 1080p spits out 900 ANSI lumens (for comparison, the Nebula Capsule II puts out a surprisingly good picture with 200) and a 1080p picture, while the Cosmos Max ups the brightness to 1500 ANSI lumens and the picture quality to 4K, while adding a couple more Dolby Digital Plus internal speakers. But both support HDR10, 100,000:1 contrast ratios, LED bulbs that are rated to last a whopping 30,000 hours, and built-in streaming service apps (in addition to a couple of HDMI ports) via Android 9.
But the most disruptive aspect of the Cosmos projectors are their price points. The 1080p model starts at just $429 for super earlybird backers on Kickstarter, and the 4K edition starts at $999, both of which drastically undercut the obvious competition. We briefly saw the Max model in action at Anker’s unveiling, and even in a room with a fair amount of ambient light, it looked terrific.
The Kickstarter is live now, and the projectors are expected to start shipping in March.