The Kodak Luma 400 Portable HD Smart Projector is one of a family of Kodak models that all share the same proportions and could each fit into the next largest like a set of rectangular, flat nesting dolls. Each step up in size comes with a step up in price, along with brightness, resolution, or both. The $449.99 Luma 400 is the next up from the Luma 350, our Editors’ Choice among small palmtop portable projectors. The 400’s key difference is a higher native resolution, at 720p (1,280-by-720), but its significantly more expensive and comes up a little short on image quality. It’s still worth considering, but the Luma 350 remains our Editors’ Choice.
Lots of Features in a Surprisingly Small Case
Small enough to fit in a large pocket, the Luma 400 almost qualifies as a pico projector. However, its 1.1-pound weight and 1.3-by-4.9-by-4.9-inch size (HWD) put it firmly in the palmtop category. Like most small projectors, it’s built around a diamond-array DLP chip, which draws less power than TI’s rectangular chips but can introduce scaling artifacts. These artifacts affect only the occasional image with small repeating patterns, and the best focus I was able to manage was slightly soft, which isn’t great in its own right but does tend to hide that sort of issue. The RGB LED light source is rated at 30,000 hours in full-power mode, and should last even longer in Eco mode.
There are three power settings to let you choose among highest brightness, longest battery life, or a compromise between the two. The battery life range is from 1.5 hours in High mode to 2.5 hours in Eco mode, with Normal mode, at 2 hours, in between.
The Luma 400 has Android OS 9 built in—the Android Open Source Project (ASOP) version, as distinct from Android TV. Setting up streaming requires connecting by Wi-Fi to an internet-connected network and signing in to Google. Beyond that, setup consists of little more than turning the power on, manually focusing, adjusting the image size by moving the projector, and picking a source.
There’s digital zoom available and both automatic and manual keystone correction, including manual horizontal keystone correction, but it’s better to skip those if you can, since they can introduce artifacts. Kodak ships the projector with a table-top tripod, which helps make it easy to aim at whatever you’re using as a screen. In addition to using the included remote to control the projector, you can use Kodak’s Luma app to control it from your phone.
Along with support for streaming over a Wi-Fi connection, the Luma 400 has an HDMI port, support for screen mirroring iOS and Android devices, and a USB Type-A port for reading files from USB memory using a built-in file browser. There’s also a USB Type-C port on the back, for power only. If you tend to read manuals, ignore the Quick Start Guide’s instructions that screen mirroring requires connecting both the projector and device to a network. In my tests, I used a Wi-Fi Direct connection to mirror an Android phone—no network required.
I was able to confirm that the Luma 400 supports 4K (3,840-by-2,160) input at 60Hz with my computer, but it connected to my Blu-ray player at 1080p SDR. A little investigation with a signal generator showed that it would accept a 4K signal with or without HDR, and with or without High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection (HDCP) version 1.4, the copy protection scheme used with 1080p Blu-ray disks. However, it did not connect when I set the generator for HDCP 2.2, the version used by 4K UHD discs, and Kodak confirmed the projector doesn’t support that protocol. In short, the 4K and HDR10 support doesn’t mean you’ll see an HDR image from 4K HDR discs.
The onboard set of two 1-watt speakers can serve in a small, quiet room, but it’s a bit underpowered even if you’re sitting next to the projector. In most cases, you’ll want to take advantage of Bluetooth or the 3.5mm audio out port to connect to headphones or an external sound system.
C-Grade Image Quality
Nobody expects home-theater quality images from a palmtop projector, but the Luma 400 is below par even by palmtop standards. The best you can say for it is that most people will find it watchable.
Part of the problem is that there’s no way to adjust settings. There’s only a single picture mode and no control even for such basics as brightness and contrast. The lack of any way to adjust sharpening is a particular issue. Its permanent setting emphasizes every skin blemish and even pores in close-ups, making the most smoothly made-up actors look like they have serious skin conditions. It also emphasizes edges, like the outline of lips or the outer edge of faces against the background, to make a large percentage of photorealistic images look oddly fake.
The good news is that this is much more of a problem for photos, where you get to look at a single frozen image for some time, than for most scenes in movies or video, where either the camera or the objects in the camera’s field of view tend to be moving. Images rarely stay frozen long enough for the problem to be obvious. But if you’re putting up a slideshow of static images, this is not the projector to use.
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Color accuracy is at the low end of what I expect from this class of projector, which means it’s off by enough for most people to notice. Skin tones, for example, tend to show a little yellow or green bias, depending on the how bright the scene is. However, colors are not off by enough for most people to find them distracting. Loss of shadow detail is in the typical range for palmtops, so it’s hard to see details in dark areas of dark scenes.
Note that there is no support for 3D, and gamers will want to look elsewhere. I measured the input lag with a Bodnar meter at 166ms for 1080p, 60Hz input and 146ms for 4K, 60Hz input. That’s enough lag that even casual gamers are likely to be bothered by it.
Kodak rates the projector at 200 ANSI lumens for the brightest mode. That’s not a high number, but Kodak deserves praise for using the ANSI standard instead of an inflated, non-standard LED lumen rating, which is not a useful basis for comparison. Using Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) standards, 200 lumens is suitable for lighting up a 64-inch diagonal, 1.0 gain screen in the dark, or a little smaller if you prefer a somewhat brighter image, as I do. In my tests, I settled on using a 55-inch diagonal image, which is at the smaller end of SMPTE’s recommended range. In a family room with moderate ambient light, the image was bright enough to be watchable, if washed out, even on an 80-inch screen.
The Most Pixels for the Size, Plus Streaming
If you don’t need streaming or quite as small a size, consider the AAXA P6X or the AAXA M7, which are both brighter than the Luma 400. The M7 also has higher native resolution, at 1080p, while the P6X delivers better shadow detail. Alternatively, if you need streaming but not the 720p resolution, consider the lower-resolution Kodak Luma 350, which shares the same brightness rating and streaming features as the Luma 400, but is smaller, lighter, and less expensive.
All that said, the Kodak Luma 400 is a more than reasonable choice if you must have a portable projector that’s as light as possible, supports both built-in streaming, and gives you the extra detail and image sharpness you get at 720p, even with soft focus.
