The Kodak Luma 75 ($189.99) projector won’t quite fit in a suit-vest pocket, but like an expensive pocket watch, everything about the physical design exudes careful craftsmanship. Even better, it works nicely, thanks to a low but serviceable 30 ANSI lumens brightness rating, a 640-by-360-pixel resolution that lets it show 720p or 1080p input without scaling artifacts, and a rechargeable battery rated at up to 90 minutes. If you need as small a projector as possible for business or personal use, the Luma 75 is the one you want, which makes it our new Editors’ Choice pick for projectors that can actually go anywhere.
Don’t Forget Where You Left It
The Luma 75 is small enough that you could lose it on your desk. It weighs just over 5 ounces and measures 0.8 by 3 by 3 inches (HWD), including the rubber feet that help keep it from sliding when a cable pulls on it. Accidentally cover it with a piece of paper, and you may have to search to find it.
The benefit of the small size, of course, is that you can take it with you as easily as you carry a wallet or cell phone. Slip it into a backpack, a briefcase, or a pocket, and you’ll have it handy whenever you need it, if only to show it off.
The case is designed for good looks as well as usability. All four sides are covered with a continuous silver band that’s broken up only by the ports, lens, focus wheel, and power switch. The matte white bottom includes a tripod mount along with the rubber feet, while the top panel is shiny white and serves as a control panel. When the unit is off, or when it’s on but the controls aren’t active, all that shows on the top panel are a Kodak logo, a TI DLP logo, and a black outline of small circle. When the unit first turns on, a set of touch-sensitive controls shows for a moment as backlit icons. You can also call them up later when needed by touching the circle.
The controls don’t give you many commands you can execute, and the device lacks a remote. The only commands are for adjusting volume, choosing the image source, and moving though files on a memory source as a slide show. The source choices let you switch among the HDMI port and two options labeled Movies and Images, which let you read files from USB memory connected to the USB-A port or from a memory card in the microSD card slot.
When I connected the projector to my Samsung Galaxy S20 phone by USB-C-to-HDMI cable, I didn’t even need to pick a source. The Luma 75 simply mirrored the phone, whether I was looking at the Home screen or a movie on Netflix. The only other ports are a 3.5mm audio-out port and a Micro USB port for charging the battery using the supplied USB-A-to-Micro-USB cable.
As with most small projectors, the Luma 75 is built around a DLP chip pared with an RGB LED light source. It negotiates a 1,280-by-720-pixel connection to computers and video sources by default. However, it has to scale the image to fit into the 640-by-360-pixel native resolution, which means it behaves like a native 720p projector with soft focus. One critical plus is that the focus control is unusually precise for a small projector, so you can at least get the best focus possible fairly easily.
Note that the onboard 1-watt speaker is usable in a quiet room, but for a more useful volume, you’ll want to connect a headset (or powered sound system) to the 3.5mm audio out.
Good-Enough Image Quality and Brightness
Good color accuracy and other aspects of image quality are nowhere near as important for this category of projector as for, say, an entry-level home entertainment model, because nobody expects home-theater-quality images from a gadget that fits in your pocket. But the Luma 75 easily handles the low bar it needs to clear.
For business graphics it delivered suitably vibrant color in my tests. And although its soft focus wasn’t suitable for showing spreadsheets or PDF documents loaded with text, it was suitable for the larger fonts in typical PowerPoint slides, should you want to mirror your phone for a quick deskside presentation.
Similarly, it handled photorealistic images well, including all of the photos and movies in our test suite, as well as some Netflix movie trailers and YouTube videos during my phone mirroring tests. Colors only rarely wandered outside a realistic-looking range. An orange in a fruit bowl was a little too red in one image, for example, and skin tones were off in another. But these obvious color errors showed infrequently enough, and colors were still close enough that almost anyone should consider them tolerable. Very much on the plus side, the Luma 75 held shadow detail well enough that I could make out was happening even in dark scenes.
The brightness was close to what I expect from the rated 30 lumens. Using Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) standards, 30 lumens would be suitable for a 21- to 29-inch diagonal 16:9 image in a dark room, using a 1.0-gain screen. I found it bright enough for short sessions for a 32-inch diagonal image (from 59 inches away), but would drop the size to a 19-inch diagonal (from 33 inches) for more comfortable viewing for longer sessions. In an office or under similar ambient-light levels, you’ll need to drop down to something closer to a letter-size page for a bright-enough image, which is still a big improvement over trying to give a presentation, or watch a movie, on your phone.
A major plus for those who find rainbow artifacts (flashes of red, green, and blue) annoying is that the Luma 75 does a good job of avoiding them. I didn’t see any in my tests, and I see them easily when they do occur. That said, you could be more sensitive to them than I am. If you have any concerns about the issue, our usual advice applies: Buy from a dealer that allows easy returns so you can test it yourself.
The Most Projector You Can Fit in Your Pocket
If you need the smallest projector possible that’s capable enough to be useful for ad hoc business presentations, showing photos to one or two people, or watching movies on your own, the Kodak Luma 75 is a compelling choice. It lacks the built-in streaming of the Kodak Luma 350, our Editors’ Choice award winner for a palmtop entertainment projector, or the Kodak Luma 150‘s ability to connect directly to a source by Wi-Fi, and it has a much lower brightness and resolution than the AAXA P7 Mini HD Projector, our Editors’ Choice pick for 1080p palmtop projectors.
But those extra features need lots of battery power, which makes all the alternatives bigger and heavier. The Kodak Luma 75 is the elegant choice, as well as our Editors’ Choice recommendation, for a pocket projector. It’s the smallest projector that will fit in your pocket and do a more than credible job.
