BlitzWolf BW-V3 Review, Specs & Price: This small, affordable projector with HD resolution looked promising when it first appeared as a pre-order on Banggood, so we were keen to try it. The BlitzWolf BW-V3 is now available and we’ve already gotten a good impression.
BlitzWolf BW-V3 Review, Specs & Price
- BlitzWolf BW-V3
- at Banggood for €70.08 – Voucher: BGCGBWV3 (pre-order)
- Lightning Wolf
Blitzwolf has been a well-known seller of charging, household and consumer electronics for years and is effectively Banggood’s house brand. The products are almost exclusively sold there. BlitzWolf often does not produce the products themselves, which means that they are often only available for a short time. Nevertheless, the quality was often very satisfactory, and new releases such as the BW-V3 projector are potentially interesting.
Mediocre resolution and brightness
The resolution of 720p is actually below what you would expect from a current projector – especially if you want to use it primarily for watching films and series. The BW-V3 gets another free ticket here because it is really cheap at well under €100. Not much needs to be said about the resolution; with larger projection you can clearly see the individual pixels if you get close enough.
Full HD videos can be played back and will then be downscaled accordingly and output in 720p. If you’re not watching Avatar, that’s fine. But you should be aware that for a little more money you can get Full HD projectors, which then simply look a little better.
As an LED projector, however, it has particularly long-lasting light elements with a service life of 20,000-40,000 hours .
Brightness is also often a contentious issue. Many will say that 250 ANSI lumens that we have here is not enough. What is “enough” is always relative. You can’t use the projector with it during the day, especially in direct sunlight, or even outdoors – I’ve tried it. In a darkened room, however, the projector is so bright that everything is easy to see.
If you’re still complaining that the picture isn’t bright enough, you probably won’t even think of buying a 720p projector. In this respect, my conclusion here is that the projector delivers a very bright image, especially for its price, if you are willing to look in the dark.
This actually names the two most important image properties. As always, you can play around with the settings such as color intensity and contrast to adjust the image a bit. There are also a few preset profiles. You do that once to set up the projector, then you probably won’t touch it again.
The 200-inch screen diagonal that the manufacturer is talking about here is rather exaggerated. This size is theoretically possible with a sufficient distance to the screen. With the rather low resolution and brightness, the picture will no longer look good. It’s not even necessary, because 100 inches is already significantly larger than almost all televisions and is probably the appropriate picture size. I wasn’t even able to create a 200-inch image in my test environment due to lack of space.
Almost no other is as compact
A special feature is certainly the small size, because with 16.5 x 12.8 x 6.6 cm the BW-V3 rightly bears the name “mini”. The weight is also very low at 550 grams, making the projector easy to transport. Thanks to a thread on the underside, the projector can also be easily attached to a tripod or upside down on the ceiling.
There is both a USB and an HDMI port , so you can easily connect a laptop, TV stick or console. The projector also supports Bluetooth 5.0 and WLAN and you should be able to easily transfer the smartphone display to the projector.
Miscellaneous
The remote control is kept very simple with the most necessary buttons for navigating through the menus. You don’t need more; I don’t think the processing here is particularly good. The buttons don’t always respond to every press, and I haven’t yet figured out if that’s due to the angle, the distance from the projector, or the buttons themselves. In any case, you often need to press it several times while swinging your arm at the same time, and somehow it works.
As expected, the speaker is not good, but at least not completely unusable. In general, I have to say that the loudspeakers in cheap projectors have surprised me again and again lately. If you want to have a reasonably good sound experience, you should still connect a speaker.
That leaves the fan, which can also ruin a home cinema projector if everything else fits. The constant buzzing while watching a movie is just annoying, and when it’s so loud that you can’t tune it out, a movie is no longer fun. BlitzWolf specifies 44dB here, which is generally damn loud for a projector.
I can’t get to the volume when measuring, but the fan is really clearly audible, which makes it the biggest criticism of the projector for me. Of course, the larger the room and the louder the volume of the video via a connected box, the less disturbing it is. When watching series in the bedroom in the evening, however, the projector would be too loud.
Just a good deal?
At first glance I was very impressed by the projector. I like the design, the data sheet reads well for a projector under €100 and I’ve usually had good experiences with BlitzWolf products in this price segment. In the practical test, only a few negative points were noticed. On the one hand, that would be the remote control, which does not always work reliably, and the somewhat too loud fan.
At a price of less than €100, the resolution of “only” 720p and the 250 ANSI lumens are tolerable. We recently tried a very similar projector that we found on Amazon and it’s proving popular even at 720p resolution. In a direct comparison, I would rate the Amazon model as slightly better; the advantage of the BlitzWolf projector is its even smaller size.
You shouldn’t expect a perfect home cinema in this price range and the BlitzWolf BW-V3 is no exception. But it is quite cheap and can still be used for certain applications. As long as the shipping is from China, I would recommend a comparable model from Amazon for the same price.
