Kodak Flik X10

The Kodak Flik X10 ($139.99) is one of the least-expensive 1080p home entertainment mini projectors we've tested, but the operative word here is inexpensive, not cheap. The X10 offers impressively good fit and finish for the price. And although its brightness, rated at 150 ANSI lumens, is low enough to make it best limited to a relatively small screen size—and ideally a dark room or dim lighting—it offers a quite-watchable picture with decent color accuracy and better-than-merely-decent contrast and shadow detail. The combination makes it a good choice for tight budgets or as an inexpensive second projector for occasional gaming or watching a movie, whether indoors or in the backyard.

The X10 is similar in design to any number of other home entertainment mini projectors that range in price from a little less than Kodak's asking for the X10 to more than twice as much. They include the Vankyo Leisure 470 at the low end of the range, and the Vankyo Performance V700W at the high end. Where the X10 differs from the more expensive competition is in what it doesn't offer. The V700W, for example is much brighter and has more robust audio, while Kodak's own Flik HD10 offers fully integrated Android TV for streaming. The X10 sticks to a lower brightness level and basic features only, lacking built-in streaming support.

What these projectors all have in common is a native 1080p resolution, courtesy of a single large LCD that adds red, green, and blue filters over individual cells. Each triad of red, green, and blue serves as a single pixel. (A 5,760-by-1,080 matrix of cells, with three cells per pixel, works out to a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution.) They also each use a white LED light source, which is meant to last the life of the projector—20,000 hours for the X10. Projecting all three primary colors at once guarantees that bright areas won't break up into little rainbows when you move your eye or something moves on screen, which is a potential issue for single-chip models that project the primaries in sequence instead, as is typical for DLP-based projectors.

The X10 measures just 3.5 by 7.7 by 7.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.3 pounds, making it easy to move it from place to place as needed. Setup consists of little more than connecting the power cord and video source, pointing the lens at whatever you're using for a screen, and focusing. The connectors—two HDMI 1.4 ports for video sources and a USB port for reading files from USB memory or powering a streaming dongle in one of the HDMI ports— are all on the back panel.

As is typical for mini projectors, adjusting image size is best done by moving the projector. There's no optical zoom, and the digital zoom is best avoided. Using it would lower the brightness, and the rated 150 ANSI lumens is already low enough to severely limit how large an image you can use. One unusual touch is an adjustable mirror, rather than digital adjustments, for removing vertical keystone distortion. This lets you correct for keystone issues without hurting brightness, but in my tests, adjusting the mirror by more than a few degrees made it impossible to maintain focus over the entire screen.

The onboard audio system, which offers dual 3-watt speakers, delivers usable quality at a volume suitable for a small-to-midsize family room. For higher volume or better quality, you can connect an external sound system using the 3.5mm audio-out port.

The X10 menu offers three predefined picture modes. The only option for modifying any of them is changing the color temperature, with choices of Warm, Cool, and Standard. There's not even a setting for brightness or contrast. Some preliminary tests quickly showed that Standard mode had both the most appropriate brightness and contrast levels, and the best color accuracy, making it the obvious choice for my viewing tests.

When viewing in a dark room, colors weren't quite as saturated as they should be, giving them a bit of a faded look, but hues were generally close to accurate, making the color tolerable or better for casual viewing, depending on how picky you are. Similarly, the picture looked a little grainy, but not by enough to be a serious problem. Contrast and shadow detail were surprisingly good. Dark scenes in our test suite lost some of the shadow detail I know is in them, but the X10 kept far more than the minimum needed to make out what was happening, and it even maintained a good sense of three dimensionality and much of the visual impact in the scenes. Even in a low level of ambient light, with one floor lamp turned on, the dark scenes were quite watchable, though somewhat washed out.

As you might expect at this price, the X10 doesn't support 3D, HDR, or 4K input. However, it has a short enough lag time to satisfy most casual gamers. I timed it with a Bodnar meter at 25.7 milliseconds for 1080p/60Hz input.

In my tests, the X10 delivered roughly the expected image brightness for the rating. Following the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, when using a 1.0-gain screen in a dark room, 150 ANSI lumens should be bright enough for a 47-to-64-inch 16:9 image (measured diagonally). I found that with my preferred settings, it gave me a comfortably bright image for extended viewing on a 56-inch-diagonal screen and—as already indicated—the image even held up fairly well at that size when I turned on a floor lamp.

The Kodak Flik X10 can't give you a bright image at the large size a brighter model can deliver. But if you're looking for something to give you a screen size akin to that of a flat-screen TV, and that you can easily carry from room to room, to a weekend getaway, or to the backyard, it can easily fill that role.

If you're considering the X10 primarily because of its low price, be sure to also take a look at the Vankyo Leisure 470, which has a higher list price than the X10, but currently sells for a little less and adds the ability to connect via Wi-Fi to mirror Android and iOS devices. If your budget can stretch a bit, also consider the Vankyo Performance V700W, which offers notably higher brightness as well as more robust audio, or the Kodak Flik HD10, which includes built-in Android TV support.

That said, the Flik X10's low price can make it a good inexpensive choice, including as a handy second projector that will let you leave your more expensive model in its permanent setup undisturbed when you need an occasional ad hoc setup.