Yaber T2 Plus Review

The Yaber T2 Plus is one of the more expensive single-LCD-chip portable projectors we’ve tested, at $349.99 including a Google TV dongle. It’s also available without the dongle as the Yaber T2, curiously at an even higher list price ($399.99, but on sale for $299.99 at this writing). In either version, it’s also one of the brightest single-LCD-chip models, rated at 450 ANSI lumens. Both the price and brightness put it in more direct competition with DLP-based models like the Xgimi MoGo 2 Pro, which offer smaller sizes, lighter weights, and a big advantage in color quality. However, the T2 Plus’ background technology has an advantage of its own: It can’t show the red/green/blue flashes known as rainbow artifacts that plague some projectors. That fact alone can make it worth considering, particularly for those who find the flashes annoying.

Design: Heavy, But With a Helping Handle

The Yaber T2 Plus weighs 5.5 pounds and officially measures 11.4 by 5.5 by 6.5 inches (HWD). However, that makes it sound bigger than it actually is, since a touch more than 2 inches of the height is strictly for the handle. Even ignoring those extra inches, though, it’s big and heavy for a portable projector, and the handle is a welcome extra that makes it easier to carry.

Physical setup requires little more than plugging either the Google TV dongle or another HDMI source into the one HDMI port and pointing the projector at whatever you’re using for a screen. By default, autofocus and automatic vertical keystone correction kick in whenever you turn on or move the projector, though you must adjust settings manually for horizontal keystone, using the remote and the settings option that comes up on the screen immediately after the automatic adjustments are finished. During initial setup, the projector also takes you through some setup screens, telling you to connect to an internet-connected network, either via Wi-Fi or by plugging an Ethernet cable into the LAN port on the back panel. It then checks for updates and downloads them, if it finds any.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

The lens offset for the T2 Plus puts the vertical center of the image at the same height from the floor as the vertical center of the lens, so if you’re sitting behind the projector, you’ll need to place it below your eye height to avoid blocking the screen. As a welcome touch, the handle is designed to rotate to a position below the projector’s bottom and a little in front, where it can serve as a stand to tilt the T2 Plus and adjust the picture height. As a result, it’s generally worth taking advantage of the automatic keystone and the autofocus. For my testing, however, I turned off keystone adjustments, and I ignored the obstacle-avoidance and digital zoom features, since all of these digital adjustments can lower image brightness.

The T2 Plus is designed around an LCD that has a red, green, or blue filter over each individual cell, and a large enough matrix to have 1,920 by 1,080 sets of red, green, and blue triads, with each triad serving as one pixel in the image. The light source is a white LED with a 20,000-hour rated lifetime. Because this paints the screen with all three primary colors at once, it can’t show rainbow artifacts. (DLP projectors show the colors one at a time, rotating through them in sequence, which is why you’ll sometimes see flashes of each individual color.) The brightness is rated at 450 ANSI lumens. The maximum input resolution it can accept is 1,920 by 1,080 pixels—the same as the native resolution—at 60Hz.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

The built-in battery is rated for 2.5 hours for viewing or 18 hours in Bluetooth speaker mode. However, note that by default, image brightness dops noticeably when switching to battery power, with the power setting (labeled Brightness) changing from 100 to 60. You can reset it manually if you like (including to a still lower setting), but using a brighter image will shorten the battery life.

After you plug in the bundled dongle, you must go through the standard Google TV setup. One well-thought-out convenience is that the dongle comes with a right-angle HDMI adapter, so the dongle itself is both close to and parallel to the back of the case. Even better, when using the adapter, the dongle gets power through the HDMI port, so you don’t have to plug in a USB cable for that.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

The two features together let you leave the dongle permanently plugged in without having to worry about hitting it on something when you’re carrying it or getting a USB cable hooked on a doorknob. Note that if you lose the adapter, you can still plug the dongle into the HDMI port, but then it will stick out behind the T2 Plus, and you’ll need to connect a cable between it and the projector’s USB port to power it.

As far as software goes, the dongle is partly integrated into the T2 Plus, but only to the extent that you can use the same remote to control both. Even with the projector connected to your network, you still have to connect the dongle to your network independently, with Wi-Fi as the only connection option.

Note also that the T2 Plus offers several approaches to mirroring Android and iOS phones and tablets. For most of them, you have to connect both the projector and source to the same network. However, I was able to mirror my Samsung phone by using Miracast (Samsung’s Smart View option) without any problems and with neither the phone nor the projector connected to a network.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

The audio system, built around dual 8-watt JBL speakers and Dolby Audio, delivered easily enough volume to fill a large family room combined with good enough quality to be highly usable. Alternatively, you can connect an external sound system using the 3.5mm stereo output. You can also connect via Bluetooth both to external speakers and to other audio sources to use the projector as a Bluetooth speaker, but in testing, the projector failed to connect to my Bluetooth headphones. Yaber said it was able to replicate the problem with some audio brands but not others, and that it is still looking into the issue at this writing.

Testing the Yaber T2 Plus: Decent Image Quality, If You Adjust It

The T2 Plus menus offer five predefined picture modes (which let you adjust color temperature only), plus one User mode, which adds settings for contrast, brightness, sharpness, and color saturation. Straight out of the box, none of the modes held shadow detail well, and scenes dominated by mid-tones were too dark, making User mode the obvious choice for my viewing tests.

I wound up adjusting all the available settings. Raising brightness both improved brightness for midtones and improved shadow detail significantly without raising the black level too much. Bringing contrast down let me see details in bright areas like clouds instead of blowing out the highlights. In addition, I lowered sharpness to eliminate the oversharpening from the default settings and boosted the color saturation just a bit, though the colors were still slightly less saturated than they should be.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

After my adjustments, the image improved to the point where it’s best described as good enough. The hues in our test clips were obviously off, but not by enough for most people to find annoying. I also saw a slight yellow bias, most noticeable in scenes with a lot of white or near-white, but again, not by enough for most people to find bothersome. Colors were also slightly faded (another way to say they weren’t saturated enough), which hurt contrast and the sense of three-dimensionality in brighter scenes. But all of these issues are forgivable for an inexpensive projector, as is the lack of support for HDR and 3D.

The T2 Plus is a poor choice for games that require quick reaction times. Even with all automatic features and smart features turned off and no keystone adjustment, I measured it with my Bodnar 4K Lag Tester at 161 milliseconds (ms) in Sports mode and 178ms in all other modes.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

In my formal viewing tests, the brightness was close to what I expect from the 450-lumen rating. Using Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations, 450 lumens should be suitable for an 83-to-112-inch, 1.0-gain screen in a dark room. In my tests, it was a touch dimmer than I’d like when using a 90-inch screen, but I tend to prefer the brighter image size at the small end of the range. In a family room with lots of windows in the daytime, I could easily watch a soccer game using a 76-inch diagonal image (after the automatic keystone adjustment). Still, the colors were a bit washed out, and shots of the stands showed little to no shadow detail.

Verdict: A Battery-Powered Projector That’s Worth a Look

The T2 Plus delivers enough for its price to make it worth considering, particularly if you can’t stand rainbow artifacts, but be sure to compare it to some DLP-based competition, including the Xgimi MoGo 2 Pro, as well as the more expensive Xgimi Halo+ and Anker Nebula Capsule 3 Laser. All three are lighter and smaller than the T2 Plus, and they deliver better color quality, according to our tests.

The Halo+ (which earns our Editors’ Choice nod for a high-brightness mini projector) and the MoGO 2 Pro share the T2 Plus’ tower shape at a smaller size. Among these three tower-shaped models, the MoGO 2 Pro is the smallest and has the lowest rated brightness. It’s also the only projector of the four included here that that lacks a built-in battery. The Capsule 3 Laser, which earned its own Editors’ Choice award for top image quality for the category, is shaped like an oversize soda can and is both the smallest and lightest of the four. But it also offers the lowest brightness.

All that said, if a tight budget rules out both of our top picks in this group, and you need a model with a built-in battery, the T2 Plus may be the best fit.

About M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I’ve covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I’ve written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

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