Formovie Dice Mini Projector Review: Ambitious ultra-portable projector

I already know that bright movies look great, but what about darker scenes? I played LOTR Fellowship of the Ring and Solomon Kane, and both offered a very pleasant viewing experience. But the dark scenes did show that the black is more like darker gray. This isn’t really the fault of the Formovie Dice, it’s the nature of the projectors in general. You can achieve those deep blacks by keeping the room as dark as possible and even project the image on a black screen or wall.

Lastly, I am sure a lot of you are wondering if you can use the device during the day. And you can as long as there some mild shade and the image is bright enough. I assume you’d want to either check the news or open some documents and for these purposes, I think that the Formovie Dice can be bright enough.

Can you calibrate the projector?

Yes, it’s possible to calibrate the Formovie Dice by going to Settings > Image > Image Mode > User Mode and then just change the options. You can adjust the Brightness, the Contrast, the Saturation, the Sharpness and Hue, but it’s also possible to change the Color Temperature – standard, warm or cold, as well enable Digital Noise Reduction. But even after playing around with the settings, I wasn’t really able to get a better picture quality than the offered profiles. So yes, you can rely on the default profiles to get the best image quality possible with this projector.

Gaming with the Formovie Dice

Since I played some games with every projector that I tested so far, I had to do the same with the Formovie Dice. And it’s a nice way of checking if there is any unwanted latency when compared to a regular display.

Then again, my old Dell U2515H can hardly be considered a gaming monitor with its 60Hz and far-from-ideal input lag, but, from the video, I can see that the projected image matches the view on the monitor. I played a racing game (if you can call it that), the Crew 2 and yes, it’s nice to see the cars on a larger ‘display’. So, it is very much possible to game on the Formovie Dice as long as you don’t want any of the dedicated gaming features – higher refresh rate and all those features that sync better with the GPU (Freesync and G-Sync).

The Audio Quality

The audio quality is one of the strongest points of the Formovie Dice. The two 10W speakers are loud, unexpectedly loud. Even the calm Android TV music in the beginning (during the installation wizard) took me by surprise and I had to lower the volume. This means that despite its size, the projector can easily fill up a larger room with sound. Yes it’s loud, but is it clear? It’s way better than a lot of TVs in the same price range, so yes, it’s very much usable without having to rely on external speakers. I suppose the only reason would be the spaciality of the sound because it may be a bit weird to hear a movie from behind if the projector is not positioned in front of you.

The Battery Life

While the FCC ID website generously gave me access to most of the main components from inside the Formovie Dice, they did not show the batteries. But we do know that there are 16,000mAh which the manufacturer says should last for about three hours on a single run. I did test it, but before talking about the result know that there is a brightness drop when switching to the battery mode. And it was almost unnoticeable (must have been something like 20% – it’s Eco Mode and you can change it to View Mode which will eat up the battery faster).

The Formovie Dice went down to 50% after an hour and 40 minutes and it did end up going past 3 hours as long as I kept the Eco Mode enabled. Moving to the View Mode, it will offer half this performance, but still, you can watch a full movie without having to connect the projector to a power source. And that’s excellent.

The Conclusion

I am impressed by how compact the Formovie Dice projector is and how it can show an entire movie without any access to a power source. Pair that with a good image quality and the excellent audio quality, and we have a winner, right? It’s definitely an impressive device, but there are a few shortcomings that it needs to address before that. The autofocus works really well, but the auto keystone correction does not, so I had to adjust it manually and I am fairly sure that it can be easily fixed.

I guess Netflix should also be a part of the Android TV experience or at least make it easy for the user to add it. Other than that, I have no additional complaints – the price is right, the image and the built quality is good, so it can definitely compete with some more expensive models.

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