The Anker Nebula Cosmos 4K SE (not to be confused with the older Cosmos Laser 4K) looks more like a tall car battery with a handle on top than the usual cube that’s typical of room-to-room portable projectors. However, the extra height and depth compared with traditional projectors serves the same purpose as the more common shape: Both add enough space inside the box for a reasonably high-quality audio system. The handle also makes it easier to carry from room to room or beyond. (An optional $99.99 carrying case makes the “beyond” even more feasible.) Most important, the 4K SE delivers good image and audio quality at a relatively low price: $1,299.99. It’s our new Editors’ Choice pick for a low-cost, 4K room-to-room portable.
Design: A Little Clunky Outside, All the Right Stuff Inside
In addition to its atypical shape, the 4K SE departs from the room-to-room portable crowd by not even trying for a sleek, modern look. Instead, it’s a basic box with rounded corners plus a handle. The look may keep you from wanting to set it up permanently in your family room, but it shouldn’t be a problem otherwise, and the handle makes it more portable than most of its competition.
As with all 4K room-to-room portables today, the 4K SE takes advantage of a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel DLP chip that relies on TI’s fast-switch pixel shifting to deliver 3,840 by 2,160 pixels to the screen. Less common is its light source, a laser-LED hybrid that uses red, green, and two blue channels for the LEDs (the second blue channel boosts brightness) plus a red laser, which increases the color gamut to a rated 123.3% of BT.709, the standard for HDTVs, or 65.2% of BT.2020, the standard for UHD TVs. The rated lifetime for the light source is 30,000 hours in Standard power mode. The rated brightness is 1,800 ANSI lumens.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The projector weighs 9.9 pounds, which is typical for the category, and it measures 8.7 by 6.5 by 10.4 inches (HWD). Note that it doesn’t offer any built-in feature that would let you tilt it up or down to point at whatever you’re using for a screen. You’ll have to prop it up on something under the front or back edge (a stack of coffee-table coasters worked nicely in my tests) or mount it on a tripod to aim it.
Initial setup is standard for projectors that use fully integrated Google TV for their OS, with Wi-Fi as the only choice for connection to your internet-connected network. Two HDMI ports on the back panel let you optionally connect to HDMI video sources, and you’ll also find a USB port for a thumb drive or hard drive.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The 4K SE also offers a full complement of automatic setup features—including autofocus, keystone adjustment, screen fit, and obstacle avoidance—and the features I tried worked as promised. However, except for autofocus, which reliably delivered sharp focus across the screen, I turned the features off for my viewing tests. If you move the projector frequently, you may prefer having them on or using the digital zoom for ease of setup, but keep in mind that digital adjustments lower brightness and can introduce artifacts in some images. Like most room-to-room portables, the 4K SE has no optical zoom.
The audio system is built around two 15-watt speakers and supports Dolby Audio and Dolby Digital Plus. It delivers remarkably good sound quality for a projector and enough volume to fill a large family room. If you prefer, you can connect an external sound system using Bluetooth, the 3.5mm stereo audio-out port on the back, or the one HDMI port that supports eARC. However, the 4K SE’s audio is good enough that you’re more likely to want to connect to the projector from another source to use it as a Bluetooth speaker.
Testing the Anker Nebula Cosmos 4K SE: Good Color Accuracy and Shadow Detail
The 4K SE’s menu offers well over 20 picture modes—seven each for SDR, HDR10, and HLG input, plus three for Dolby Vision—showing only those modes at any given time that are appropriate for the current input. Note that the HDR10 list also showed in my tests with HDR10+ input, although the 4K SE ignores HDR10+’s additional features. Almost all of the modes in each list offer a wealth of settings you can modify to adjust image quality.
After some preliminary testing I chose the NebulaMaster mode for our formal testing for both SDR and HDR10. In both cases, Movie mode delivered the best color accuracy of all the modes, but NebulaMaster was a close second, and it was the brighter of the two.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
One feature you may want to adjust for both SDR and HDR is frame interpolation—labeled in the menus as MEMC. It’s set to medium by default and can improve the look of live and recorded video. For filmed material, however, it adds a digital video effect even at the low setting, which makes movies look like live video. If you’re one of the many who don’t like that look, turning the feature off will make filmed material look like you expect it to.
For our standard viewing tests in a dark room, the 4K SE offered good color accuracy and contrast in brightly lit scenes, along with good shadow detail and a sense of three-dimensionality even in dark scenes. The default for the black level was one step too high for a dark room, but adjusting it to the right setting improved the image so slightly that most people would have to switch back and forth to see the difference. Even with the adjustment, the black level wasn’t dark enough to retain all the dramatic visual impact in the darkest scenes in our test clips for either SDR or HDR input. However, in rooms with ambient light—where a room-to-room portable like the 4K SE is most likely to be used—the light tends to wash out dark areas on the screen with any projector. With lights on, the more important issue is having high enough brightness to stand up to the light.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
For movies on disc that we test in both SDR and HDR10 formats, scenes that are dominated by midtones delivered a touch lower overall brightness for HDR10 but were still bright enough to be quite watchable. Both versions also offered good enough shadow detail to make it easy to see what was happening in the darkest scenes in our tests, even in a moderate level of ambient light. And very much on the plus side, the HDR10 versions lived up to their promise of delivering improved shadow detail compared with the SDR versions of the same scenes.
For our informal testing using streaming material, I saw no obvious differences in quality for SDR or HDR10 between disc-based material and streaming. HLG material looked similar to HDR10, though it’s impossible to make a direct comparison based on different content. Dolby Vision material was also similar to HDR10 in most ways, except that scenes dominated by midtones were noticeably brighter than similar scenes with HDR10.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The unit we tested did not include 3D support, but the company says it expects to add it in a firmware update.
As with any single-chip DLP projector, the 4K SE can show rainbow artifacts, but I saw almost none in my SDR testing and only a few more with HDR. A welcome plus for those who are concerned about this issue is that Anker offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try the projector for yourself.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Input lag is short enough for all but the most serious gamers. My Bodnar 4K Lag Tester measured it in Extreme game mode at 18.3 milliseconds for both 1080p and 4K input at 60Hz.
Based on Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, the 4K SE’s rated brightness should make it bright enough to fill a roughly 165-to-220-inch, 1.0-gain, 16:9 screen in a dark room. With my preferred settings, it was suitably bright for a 90-inch screen for both SDR and HDR material in both a dark room and in a family room with lights on at night. It was also watchable—if washed out—at that size in the daytime in a family room with windows.
Verdict: A Top Performer for the Price
The 4K SE delivers impressive value. Its 4K resolution puts it in competition with the Hisense C2 Ultra, our current top pick for a 4K room-to-room portable, despite being much closer in list price to the Anker Nebula Mars 3, our 1080p room-to-room top pick. If you’re considering it for its price, be sure to take a look at the Mars 3 and also at the Epson EF22, another 1080p model. The Mars 3 looks much like the 4K SE and weighs about the same, but it adds water, dust, and drop resistance, plus a battery, making it more rugged and better suited to outdoor use. The EF22 is lighter than either, offers a gimbal mount for easy setup, and is one of the few room-to-room models that’s guaranteed not to have rainbow artifacts.
If you like the 4K SE for its high resolution, be sure to also look at the C2 Ultra and the smaller, lighter JMGO N1S Ultimate. Like the EF22, both come on gimbal mounts for easy setup, while the C2 delivered the best image quality overall on our tests of all the projectors mentioned here. However, both cost significantly more than the 4K SE. If you want 4K resolution with good image and audio quality at a budget price (for the category, at least), the 4K SE is the projector others will have to beat. That’s easily enough to make it our Editors’ Choice pick for a low-cost 4K room-to-room portable.
Anker Nebula Cosmos 4K SE
Pros
View
More
The Bottom Line
The Anker Nebula Cosmos 4K SE is the best room-to-room portable projector for buyers on a budget, with excellent brightness and image quality.
Like What You’re Reading?
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links.
By clicking the button, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy.
You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
About M. David Stone
Contributing Editor
