Dangbei Atom Laser Projector review

If you would’ve searched for the best projectors five years ago, the only names you would’ve seen bandied about would be JVC, Epson and Optoma. But these days, new competitors out of China like Dangbei and Xgimi are giving the traditional projector makers a run for their money.

Case in point? The brand-new Dangbei Atom. Packing in a laser light source that provides a very bright image for such a small projector, the Atom proves a worthy option if you’re shopping for a small-but-mighty projector. It may not match up with the big dogs, but its portability is on another level.

This isn’t the first Dangbei projector worth talking about, either — Dangbei set a solid pace for itself with the Mars Pro 4K projector last year, providing a great image at a respectable price and wrapping it all into an elegant design. The Atom borrows a slim Mac Mini-like form factor we’ve seen on its biggest rival, the Xgimi Eflin, and it uses it well.

It may not quite be the homerun that the Mars Pro 4K was last year, but the Atom offers a satisfying image and sound for casual viewing on the go.

Dangbei Atom review: Pricing and availability

The Dangbei Atom is a lower cost option in the projector market, coming in a hair below the $1000 mark at $899 — and like Dangbei’s other projectors, the MSRP is hardly the lowest available price. It’s regularly available at a discount, with a street price as low as $750 during sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Dangbei Atom review: Design

When the Xgimi Elfin hit the market, it was an interesting projector, particularly because of how it squished everything into a footprint the size of a Mac Mini. The Dangbei Atom comes in at nearly the exact same size with differences measured by hundredths of an inch. The Atom has gone for a darker design than the Elfin’s white palette, offering a metallic look with a wrap-around grille that feels more industrial.

The whole unit sits just under two inches tall, which makes it highly portable, which explains Dangbei selling a carrying case to go with the projector. The flat design doesn’t bother to include any feet that might be used to prop it up, but the Atom has a threaded mount on the bottom for setting it on a tripod.

The sides let air in to be pumped through cooling fins and radiate out the back of the projector. That’s where you’ll find all of the ports for the Atom. The selection of ports are pretty standard and simply include an HDMI port, a USB-A port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a power barrel port.

On one side, you might just be able to make out the two speakers that the Dangbei Atom includes. And if that gives you pause, it should. Having two speakers might mean more volume, but putting both speakers on one side ensures you don’t get a real stereo listening experience. Generally, you ought to consider a separate audio device for a projector if you want the sound to live up the picture, but Dangbei still could have done better here.

While the overall design may not be exciting aesthetically, it’s exciting to see how the engineering continues to improve as both Xgimi and Dangbei race to put smaller and brighter lights into smaller and smaller form factors.

Dangbei Atom review: Performance

The Dangbei Atom offers a suite of tools for quick image adjustments: It can automatically adjust focus, vertical and horizontal keystone, and fit the image to available screen space. It can also avoid obstacles in the way of the projection. These tools are helpful if you move the projector often, though ultimately most will result in less usable image area to make up for an unideal projection setup, with autofocus being the one exception.

In terms of performance, it pumps out a surprisingly bright image that works effectively in a dark room. It’s not so bright that you’ll be able to leave the lights on — or enjoy much content during the day — but turning on an overhead light or nearby lamp doesn’t wash out the image.

The Dangbei Atom’s 1080p picture leaves plenty of room for improvement, but is far from being a letdown as long as you keep the screen size within a reasonable limit. When stretched to its upper limits, imagery can look a little soft and grainy and the DMD inside the Atom also suffers from a dithering issue I’ve seen on quite a few projectors with small DMDs. This rears its head when displaying a large area in a single, dark color. It looks like a bunch of pixels squirming around in that space. It doesn’t cause issues for all content, but can be problematic for cartoons or games.

Contrast can also be an issue for the Atom, as can its color performance. Its gamut is a little lacking, and while a lot of natural colors come through well enough, some of the more vibrant and poppy colors from something like Cyberpunk Edgerunners or Avatar appear somewhat drab, especially compared to some of the projectors targeting the BT.2020 color space, like the Hisense C1.

While the projector supports HDR10, the projector’s display capabilities aren’t going to really make much use of it. The contrast and color simply aren’t there. The Atom also only supports HDR through its built-in streaming software and won’t support it coming from HDMI or USB sources. Fortunately, the operating system runs smoothly and isn’t as slow as others I’ve used, such as the one running on the JMGO N1 Ultra.

The Dangbei Atom may not be a top performer, but it has an altogether respectable picture for a projector of its size and price.

Dangbei Atom review: Test Results

The Dangbei Atom leverages its ALDP laser light source to reach impressive brightness levels for such a small projector. Taking lux readings at 9 points across an all white image with a light meter in the Atom’s brightest mode and multiplying the average by the area of the projection, I measured 1,084 lumens, which is within striking distance of Dangbei’s own 1,200 ISO lumen rating. By default, the projector is a little dimmer, but increasing the brightness doesn’t come with notable degradation to image quality.

The contrast of the projector is not quite as impressive. Taking an average lux measure of an all-black image at 1.5 lux and comparing it to the measures taken of an all-white image, which hit 1014 lux, I get a rough measure of contrast for the projector. On the Dangbei Atom, this test saw the projector achieve a 676:1 contrast ratio. It’s not a horrible result, but it’s lackluster to be sure, falling well short of the contrast just about any LCD display would achieve. This is also an ideal circumstance, and contrast is worse when displaying bright and dark content at the same time.

Color is also a weak point for the Atom, ALPD laser projectors aren’t known for their wide color gamut like their triple-laser counterparts. I took a color gamut measurement using a SpyderX Elite colorimeter and DataColor’s display analysis software with the projector shining against a 1.1-gain projector screen, and the Dangbei Atom managed just 93% coverage of the sRGB color space and 71% of the DCI-P3 color space.

Dangbei Atom review: Audio

The Dangbei Atom has a fairly quiet fan inside that’s practically inaudible when the projector isn’t in its maximum brightness setting and is otherwise not an issue at all, as the speakers on the Atom easily drown out the cooling fan.

In a quiet room, setting the volume to just 25% is enough to get an audible but impactful presentation from the dual 5-watt speakers. Just a small increase to 35% brings some punch. The speakers don’t ramp up exponentially though. At 100% volume, they’re plenty for a small room, but they’ll leave you wanting if you’ve got a medium-sized space (200 square feet or more).

The speakers have decent range and don’t noticeably distort at max volume (though a couple pops encouraged me to lower the volume back down slightly). Surprisingly, they provide a good bit of bass that you might not expect from a small device like this. They do seem to have some dynamic range compression on, though, as during a movie, many events that I’d expect to be quite loud (gunshots and explosions) tended not to boom out above the rest of the content in any way.

That decent performance does make it a bit more of a shame that the speakers are on one side. You simply won’t be getting as engrossing audio as possible from the speakers because of the mono performance. While you might enjoy plunking the projector down and watching something, a true cinema night will call for an external sound system of some kind, even if it’s just a decent Bluetooth speaker.

Dangbei Atom review: Gaming

The Dangbei Atom shows modest chops for gaming. It doesn’t have anything too special to enhance the experience — like the 120Hz and 240Hz modes of some projectors — nor is it especially sharp like 4K models or brimming with HDR dazzle.

Thankfully, it can keep up with casual gaming and story-based titles just fine. Even playing through the fairly quick-paced Expandabros, I was able to keep up with the action. That’s thanks to its responsiveness with Game Mode enabled.

By running a timecode on both a 90Hz OLED laptop and mirroring the screen over to the Dangbei Atom, I was able to measure a latency of 81 milliseconds by taking a high-speed photo of both and calculating the difference between the up-to-date time on the laptop and the time on the projector. Enabling Game Mode dropped that latency to 25 milliseconds. The projector also exhibits only a short ghosting trail, albeit a pronounced one. That said, I don’t feel this projector is up to the task for fast-paced games because of the limited refresh rate and that distinct afterimage.

Dangbei Atom review: Smart TV Interface

The Dangbei Atom comes running the Google TV platform. It's a great system, has loads of apps, and is easy to navigate. Google may be a bit aggressive with its ads, though.

The Atom will let you set the projector up with either your Google account or skip the account and just stick with the stock apps, which include Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, and a built-in media player. This method makes for a quicker setup, especially if you plan to just use this with an external device, though it’s worth remembering that there’s no HDR support for HDMI sources on the Atom.

Overall, the Atom’s smart platforms runs well. It can be a little slow to boot, but once it’s running, it has been reasonably smooth. The only time I noted it getting bogged down was when it was busy downloading and installing an update.

Dangbei Atom review: Remote

The remote for the Dangbei Atom is very simple but equally useful: It has the simple navigation buttons you’d expect on a Google TV product. A navigation ring sits at the center with a Google Assistant button above that and a power button at the top. Below the ring are your Home, Apps, and Back buttons. Volume is on a vertical pill-button that’s easy to feel out, and three app shortcuts sit next to that.

Helping with setup, the remote has two buttons on its side as well. One toggles a manual focus mode and the other brings up a projection menu with access to focus, image correction, and more settings. Alas, for a projector you’ll mostly want to use in a dark room, it would have been better to have lighting on the remote, but there is none.

Dangbei Atom review: Verdict

The Dangbei Atom is a modest little projector. You won’t see it topping any charts, though. Its 1080p image isn’t insanely sharp, and its laser light source doesn’t provide a very wide color gamut. But it’s just a small projector you can get for $750 (at least usually).

It provides serious portability while being able to cast a fairly large image in dim and dark rooms thanks to its 1,000+ lumens of brightness. It’s well rounded for such a small, modest system and puts many of the dimmer little projectors, like the Xgimi Halo on notice.

That said, if portability isn’t key, you can enjoy a much better picture from something like the BenQ HT2060 or, most likely, Dangbei’s own Mars Pro (a 1080p version of the Mars Pro 4K I tested). Both offer better performance across the board, though they are a few hundred dollars more expensive. If performance matters more than value, those would be the ones to go for, but if you just want a portable projector for a movie night, the Atom delivers on the fundamentals.