The menus offer three power settings and five picture modes. All three power settings are available when using either AC power or the built-in battery, but they give the best color accuracy in the brightest (Boost) mode and the worst in the lowest power (Eco) mode, which had an impossible-to-miss green tint. For my viewing tests, I used Boost mode.
In our test suite of image files and PowerPoint slides, all of the picture modes tended to show oversaturated color, particularly for reds and greens. That made Personal mode—the only one that allows any customization—my preferred choice. Lowering the saturation setting toned down the colors to an appropriate level. As a bonus, it turned a greenish yellow into a bright yellow and improved skin tones dramatically. I also saw some oversharpening, which was easy to fix by lowering the setting. After those two changes, the image and color quality for both graphics and photos in our test suite were good enough by most people’s standards, making the M8 Laser suitable for any presentation, including one with lots of photos.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Personal mode also offers settings for brightness, contrast, and hue. Based on my preliminary tests with SDR movies, I kept the same changes I made for presentations and added an adjustment for brightness. The default settings lost far too much shadow detail to make out what was going on in some dark scenes. Raising the brightness revealed more detail, but this is something of a balancing act. The trick is to find the best compromise that shows as much shadow detail as possible without washing out bright scenes. You might even want to adjust the brightness differently for different content. (Think of a baseball game, where shadow detail is rarely an issue, versus a night battle scene in Game of Thrones, where every scene is notably dark.)
Even after my adjustments, color accuracy was occasionally off by enough in our SDR tests to be spotted easily. I saw some oversaturated colors and a blue-green shift in some scenes. However, the colors are close enough for casual viewing.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The M8 Laser doesn’t support HDR or 3D. But very much on the plus side, I saw fewer rainbow artifacts (the red/green/blue flashes that single-chip projectors can show) than with most current DLP projectors. That said, since some people see these rainbows more easily than others, it’s always best to buy from a dealer who allows easy returns, so you can test this aspect out for yourself.
Input lag is in the range that most casual gamers will consider acceptable, but on the sluggish side. My Bodnar 4K Lag Tester measured it at 60.8 milliseconds for 1080p/60Hz input.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
AAXA’s high brightness rating for the M8 Laser—1,000 laser lumens in Boost mode—isn’t useful for making comparisons to other projectors. Laser lumens, like LED lumens, aren’t measurable and aren’t a standard. The number is based on a presumed subjective sense of brightness. In my tests, the image was roughly as bright as I would expect from about 550 lumens, which translates to easily bright enough to light up my 90-inch, 1.0-gain screen in a dark room. In a family room at night with lights on, the image was arguably usable at that size, but it was dim and had low contrast. Moving the projector closer to the screen, for a 57-inch image, delivered a much brighter, more watchable picture.
