Good picture and overall package, a few small annoyances

This is my first projector, I bought it after watching The Hook Up's budget king 2025 roundup video on youtube. It was one of his top 3 for "Best All-In-One", and the only of the three that had a stand that could point it vertically at a ceiling. He liked it at $250, so when I saw it here for $230 with the stand, I decided to go for it.

Overall I'm very happy with it. Great picture with plenty of brightness for indoors during the day or outside at night, good sound quality with adequate volume, and a relatively easy interface although the remote is required.

I also bought the stand and a 120" screen, and I've used it with the screen, a wall, and a ceiling.

I like that it automatically focuses on startup, and it can do an automatic digital keystone correction that gives you a square picture no matter what angle you have it at. The only downside is that it squares the picture by cutting off a bunch of pixels, lowering the effective resolution. It's fine for watching movies, but you're not going to want to use it to read your email!

I've never turned the brightness up past the default 50%, I turned it down to ~25% when I was watching something in a darker room.

The sound, on the other hand, leaves a bit to be desired. I've had almost at max for some shows, and that was with just me sitting fairly close to the projector. I could imagine with a few more people, sitting farther away or talking a bit, it might not be sufficient.

The interface is fine, I tried out the Plex app and performance seemed adequate. Typing with a remote is always annoying. But mostly I've used it with HDMI, connected to a laptop or phone.

One big annoyance is that you have to use the remote to do anything. If you loose the remote, the entire projector becomes an expensive doorstop. It remembers your previous input, but only until it looses power, then it defaults back to the home screen. It does not have any setting to default to HDMI or automatically switch inputs. When my remote had fallen behind a table, I tried a keyboard and mouse in the USB ports (one of the marketing pictures indicates mouse support) but neither one could navigate the home screen. I emailed Dangbei about this and they said they'd pass it along to their development team, and that I could buy a replacement remote for $50 (which seems incredibly steep when you can buy a streaming stick and remote for half that price.) Thankfully I found the remote pretty quickly.

The port selection in general is a little funny. There's one HDMI input and two USB-A inputs. One USB-A makes sense to power a streaming stick (it can deliver about 1.5A / 7.5W) or plug in a USB drive, but I don't see the point of a second one (maybe it would make sense if it did support KB/mouse input). USB-C would be a lot more useful for me so that I could plug in my phone and do video and power without any dongles. (Or my laptop if they boosted the power level.)

The stand feels a little small for the projector (and it's $50 price!), and it's height & port placement are a little annoying when pointing at the ceiling, because you have to bend the cables very sharply and they can push it to be at a slight angle. I ended up setting it on a book so that the cables could go down past the edge of the book. But otherwise it does the job well. The projector does have the standard 1/4" threading at the bottom, so you could use it with a different stand if desired.

These are a bunch of little nitpicks, but as I said at the start, I'm very happy with it overall. It does what I need and it's not too slow or finicky about it.