If you're looking for a low-cost home entertainment projector and Roku TV is your favorite choice for streaming, the Aurzen Eazze D1R Cube Roku TV Smart Projector—the first Roku TV projector ever—is a good place to start. As the $249.99 list price suggests, it offers a relatively low brightness, but it matches or beats most similarly priced competition we've tested, including the Kodak Flik HD10 and Aurzen's own Eazze D1G, so it will give you at least as large an image size in any given lighting condition. It also delivers reasonable image quality for the price, and then there's its big selling point, of course: It's the only projector available at this writing with a Roku OS and fully integrated Roku TV for streaming. If you're in the market for a budget model and are a Roku loyalist, it might win you over on that score alone.

Design: A Single-Chip LCD Projector With Roku TV

Many projectors today are cube-shaped, but despite its name, the D1R Cube isn't one of them. At 7.8 by 4.6 by 7.4 inches (HWD), it's more like half a cube, and small enough to easily move from room to room or fit in a backpack. Also boosting its portability is that it weighs only 4 pounds and needs only a power cord, rather than a power brick, to connect to an outlet.

Like most 1080p (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) single-chip LCD projectors, the D1R Cube paints its picture using a white LED light source shining through a 5,760-by-1,080-pixel LCD. Adding a red, green, or blue filter on each cell creates the 1,920 (5,760 divided by 3) by 1,080 red/green/blue pixels. And because all the colors are displayed at once, there's no possibility of showing rainbow artifacts, which DLP models that display only one color at a time are prone to. One particularly welcome touch is that, unlike most single-chip LCD models, the D1R Cube features a sealed optical light engine, ensuring that there won't be any dust spots on the LCD for you to clean off.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

The initial setup is slightly different from that of other current projectors, primarily because it's the only model with the Roku OS. As with early versions of Android TV, the Roku setup routine won't allow you to do anything with the projector until you've set up an account (with Roku, in this case, rather than Google). If you simply want to plug a video source into the HDMI port or connect from your phone and start viewing, the setup takes long enough to be annoying. That may be why Google TV, which is built on Android TV, has progressed to the point of allowing you to skip account setup and return to it when you're ready. The Roku setup assumes that you want to take the time to set up the account.

The Roku interface has been available in other kinds of products, from TVs to streaming sticks, for a long time. If you're not familiar with it, you might want to take a look at our Roku Streaming Stick Plus review by Will Greenwald, my PCMag colleague covering consumer electronics. In that review, Will mentions that he recommends Roku devices to less tech-savvy users because "Roku OS is consistently one of the simplest and most accessible streaming media platforms out there." 

(Credit: M. David Stone)

I don't disagree with that recommendation, but I will add that if you’re already familiar with other smart TV projectors—that is, you're a more savvy user—you may have some issues with Roku's quirks before you get to appreciating the simplicity. For example, most projectors let you bring up a list of input choices using an Input button on the remote, an option in the settings menu, or an option that shows on the Home screen immediately after startup. The Roku TV interface has none of these. Instead, it treats the HDMI option like another app tile, hiding it off-screen, so you have to scroll through a list of streaming app tiles to find it.

Wi-Fi is the only choice for connecting to your internet-connected network for streaming, but in addition to the HDMI port on the back panel, the projector also has a USB port for reading files from USB memory, as well as MiraCast support for Android devices and AirPlay for iOS.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

AirPlay requires the projector and device to both be connected to the same network. Miracast uses a Wi-Fi Direct connection, which theoretically means you should be able to stream from your Android phone, regardless of whether there's a nearby network or not. However, in my tests, it worked well only when the D1R Cube was connected by Wi-Fi to my internet-connected network. When I tried using it with my router turned off, the image consistently broke up, and the phone reported that the connection was unstable. As of this writing, Aurzen hasn't confirmed whether this is expected behavior.

As with other single-chip LCD projectors, the D1R Cube's lens offset guarantees that if the lens is pointed straight ahead, the projector will block your view if you sit directly behind it. Most often, you'll want to set it at coffee-table height or lower, tilt it up, and let the automatic keystone correction square off the image, which I did for my informal testing. However, taking advantage of that digital correction reduces brightness. For my formal tests, I sat to one side and pointed the projector straight ahead. In both setups, I relied on the autofocus, which worked as well as focusing manually, and is a lot faster.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

The onboard audio system, featuring two 5-watt speakers and Dolby audio, delivered good enough quality for casual use and sufficient volume for a family room. You can also connect an external sound system, using Bluetooth, the 3.5mm audio-out port, or the HDMI port's ARC support. There doesn't appear to be a dedicated Bluetooth speaker mode as such. An Aurzen rep said there is, but pointed only to the option to stream audio specifically from a phone or tablet connected by Bluetooth, which didn't work. When I tried it, my phone reported it was connected for audio, and its speaker went silent, but no sound came out of the projector speaker. As of this writing, Aurzen has not suggested any steps to resolve the problem.

Image Quality: Mixed Results, Depending on Input

The D1R Cube menu offers five picture modes, all of which offer a handful of settings—most notably a traditional brightness control, which is sometimes missing from low-end models. Based on preliminary testing, I chose Movie mode for my viewing tests because it offered the best color accuracy. The only change I made was to increase the Brightness setting to improve shadow detail. It helped a little, but any further increase hurt the quality by raising the black level and lowering contrast.

SDR image quality, after my adjustments, was reasonably good for this price range overall, at least for brightly lit scenes, which offered nicely saturated color. However, even in those scenes, the darker areas lost enough shadow detail to notice. And in the darkest scenes in our test clips, shadow detail was poor enough that anyone who isn't familiar with the scenes would have a hard time making out what they're seeing.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

Aurzen doesn't claim support for either HDR or 4K input for the D1R Cube. When playing 4K HDR discs, the projector negotiated a 1080p SDR connection to our Blu-ray player, as expected. However, it managed to deliver better image quality overall when I played the 4K HDR versions of the same movies we use for our SDR tests, still using Movie mode. The biggest improvement was in shadow detail, which held up nicely in brighter scenes and was significantly better than for SDR in darker scenes without any settings changes. Colors were less saturated with default settings than they should be—and also less saturated than with the SDR versions of the movies—so you might want to adjust the Saturation setting for HDR input.

The bad news is that the D1R Cube doesn't store settings for HDR separately from the ones for SDR, so if you want different settings for each, you either have to change them back and forth depending on the input, or set one picture mode for HDR and another for SDR, then switch between them as needed. Note also that this projector does not support 3D.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

Aurzen rates the D1R Cube's brightness at 330 ANSI lumens, which, according to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, is enough to light up a 71-to-96-inch, 1.0-gain screen in a dark room. However, the settings I chose delivered closer to what I expect from 200 to 225 lumens. I found it too dim for comfortable viewing for long sessions on my 90-inch screen, but easily bright enough for both SDR and HDR for my 56-inch diagonal screen. The image at that size even stood up reasonably well—if a little washed out—to a low level of ambient light from a single floor lamp, except for dark scenes in SDR input, which were completely washed out.

The input lag is too long for even the most casual gaming. I measured it with my Bodnar 4K Lag Tester at 113 milliseconds for 1080p/60Hz input.