Whoever named the Boxlight BumbleBee ($799 list) should have remembered Muhammad Ali's famous description of his fighting style—float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The Boxlight entry is much more butterfly than bee—quiet in operation, light in weight, and pretty to look at. Add it to the short but growing list of projectors that pair a DLP chip with an LED light source to shrink the machine down to a small size that was unprecedented until recently.

The BumbleBee shares most of its basics with the rest of this crop of LED projectors, which includes the Mitsubishi PK20 PocketProjector, the Samsung Pocket Imager SP-P310MEMX, and the Editors' Choice Toshiba TDP-FF1AU Mobile Projector. It offers SVGA (800-by-600) native resolution, and it's designed for uses such as giving business presentations to small groups or for setting up at a moment's notice at home to watch movies, show photos, or play games.

All of these projectors are small and lightweight. The BumbleBee is just 1.1 pounds, and measures 1.9 by 4.8 by 3.9 inches (HWD). The power block (which is about a third as large as the projector) and cord add just under a pound. So does the included battery, which is good for 2 hours on a full charge, according to Boxlight.

Setup is easy. The BumbleBee offers an HD-15 connector (which serves as both a VGA port and component-video port), S-Video and composite-video ports, stereo minijacks for both audio input and output, and an SD card slot to let you show photos or presentations stored on an SD card. (The projector can read JPG, AVI, and MPG files from a card.) To set it up, you simply plug in the AC adapter and cables (or SD card), turn the projector on, point it at a wall or screen, and manually focus the image.

One minor issue you may run into is that the right-angle power plug tends to cover either the audio ports or the VGA port, so you may have to twist and turn cables to get everything plugged in. More important, as with other LED projectors with built-in audio, the volume is far too low to be useful. If you want to watch movies, be sure you have an external audio system handy to plug into the audio output.

As I've pointed out in other LED projector reviews, the current crop of LED projectors all have lower ANSI lumen ratings than standard projectors. Samsung, for example, rates the SP-P310MEMX at 50 ANSI lumens, Mitsubishi rates the PK20 at 25 lumens, and Toshiba doesn't even give a rating for its projector. Fortunately, perception of brightness is nonlinear. Double the brightness in lumens, and you'll hardly notice the difference. Even the difference between 25 lumens and 1,000 lumens is less apparent than you might expect.

Case in point: The Samsung, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba results in my tests ranged between 16 and 39 lumens, but all three are closely matched for actual use. In a bright room with sunlight streaming through the windows, any of them can throw a usable image of up to about 15 inches. At night, with typical ambient lighting, the usable size goes up to about 40 inches. Dim the lights, and you can move up to a still larger size.

Boxlight claims that the BumbleBee is brighter than its competition, at 150 ANSI lumens. On my tests, however, I measured it at just 23 lumens in its bright mode, putting it in the same category as the other LED projectors. (I didn't run our usual contrast-ratio measurements on any of these projectors, because they aren't bright enough to measure contrast ratio reliably.)

Most DLP projectors suffer from a rainbow effect, with white areas breaking up into red, green, and blue when you shift your gaze or when the white objects move on screen. The effect is more obvious in all the LED projectors I've reviewed than with standard DLP projectors, but the BumbleBee earns points for having the least obvious rainbow effect of any of the LED projectors. Even so, if you're sensitive to this effect, you can expect to see it with the BumbleBee.

More troublesome is that in a dark enough room, two lines of small dots appear—one above the projected image and one below—that are presumably caused by internal reflection in the optical path. Boxlight confirmed that it could replicate the dots with another unit. Fortunately, they're faint enough that they're washed away by even a little ambient light. Image quality for both computer and video signals was otherwise more than acceptable.

The Boxlight BumbleBee has the small size and portability characteristic of these LED projectors. But even with the included battery helping to make it a better value than some of its competitors, I'd shy away from it if you think you might ever want to use it in a fully darkened room.

Benchmark Test Results
Check out the Boxlight Bumblebee's test scores.