AAXA P700 HD Pocket LED Projector Review - Special Features

AAXA P700 Internal Battery

The AAXA P700 has an internal battery, and that makes this one rare pocket projector - or at least rare for brighter ones.  The projector itself comes with a small power "brick" to feed it DC power, as is typical of pico and pocket projectors.  The difference between the P700 and other bright pocket projectors we have reviewed, is that if you unplug the P700's power brick, it keeps on working, that's something other pocket projectors like the Optoma ML750 (and ML550), or the LG PF85 can't do.

I did rough timings of the battery life, by simply feeding the P700 consistent content over HDMI (PS4 or Satellite dish), and while I wasn't timing things to the second, it looks like AAXA's 70 minute claim is just about right.  No doubt there are variations of use that would beat their 70 minute claim.

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In three tries, all three topped 1 hour, but the longest I got was 1 hour and 8 minutes so 2 minutes below claim.

Of course, many factors can affect that.  For example, the projector might - or might not - be more efficient with the source being a micro-SD card or USB port.   Some settings might also affect run time.  I would suspect that using a VGA source would draw less power than HDMI as an example.  BTW, when running on battery, the projector is automatically in its ECO mode, where it claims 350 lumens.  Ok it doesn't produce that many but is still impressively bright, but we'll get to that on the Performance page!

So, let's just say that overall, an hour should be expected, but some configurations might offer a little more.

The other thing worthy of note, is that, as you can see in the photo, the battery pack is removable.  Three small philips screws need to be removed to access the battery compartment.  For those planning longer than 1 hour run times and will buy spare batteries, an easier solution than philips screws would have been nice - such as the type of doors normally found on remote controls.  Hey, if this is one of my biggest complaints, you know this is a good projector.

AAXA sells spare batteries for $24.99, a very reasonable price. I'd say if you are buying this for home use, and like to watch movies and TV on battery power, then pick up a spare battery.

One of my first thoughts, upon reading about the 70 minute battery, was "darn, no movie nights," while camping, but then, if you have a spare battery or two, it looks like movie night is back on, even when not plugged in.

Also consider that with multiple batteries, this definitely makes the P700 suitable for serious business / education use where AC power can't be depended upon.  Excellent!

P700 Media Player

Almost every pico and pocket projector offers some form of media player. Some are more powerful than others.  The P700 media player is pretty much the standard affair. It works with jpg files, txt files, well, here's the whole list of formats supported starting with music/voice:  MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV, AVI, WMV, SMV, BMP, JPG, GIF, and TXT

Missing, of note, is support for .pdf files, which many other media players do support.

When I say some media players are more powerful, a I'm talking about those projectors who's players offer support for the whole Microsoft Office suite of formats.  That means no need to convert, for example, a Powerpoint file into jags (which you can then run with the P700 media player).  If you plan to use your pocket projector primarily for work related, and are going "PC free", you'll have to decide if having Office support is important.

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HDMI - MHL?

Like a couple of other pocket and pico projectors we've reviewed, this P700 doesn't seem to have full support of MHL.  With MHL, you can easily plug in streaming sticks such as Roku,  or Amazon's Fire, and stream content from over your Wifi.  I do have a Roku stick which I use occasionally.  I was unable to get the Roku stick to work with the P700 after putting it into the HDMI port.  That would indicate (my best guess) that the HDMI port is not set up to provide power to the circuitry of the streaming sticks, which I believe is a core feature of MHL.  AAXA says almost nothing about MHL re the P700 on their site, except:

For those with some Samsung devices - notably the Galaxy series, there's an optional adapter cable so you can plug them in and project - what's on the phone/tablet's screen to watch content that way.

Better would have been full support for MHL.  For those of you with Apple TV, that's a powered device (plugs into the wall) so plugging into the HDMI port should work fine to stream from your favorite Apple devices.

MHL is a huge benefit for many cord cutting millennials, as it means they can hook up a bright yet very portable projector like this one for their "TV" and movie viewing pleasure, instead of being "forced" to watch content on "tiny" laptop, tablet or phone displays!  Well, I guess at under $500 you can't have everything.

3D - Not!

P700 comes with a mini-tripod

I think this photo says it all.  The tripod is small, less than 6 inches tall folded up, and weighs very little.

There's a screw thread located on the bottom of the projector close to dead center, so that it takes maybe 30 seconds to screw in the tripod and setup the projector.  My only warning about using the tripod relates to using it when not streaming from a streaming stick or a card.  Hooking up the projector via cables, especially HDMI, means that the cables themselves are heavy, and will tend to pull on the projector, so that if you aren't careful, the projector may fall over.  I wouldn't be overly concerned about the few inches of drop if it fell over on your table, as these portables are designed to be fairly rugged, rather, I just wanted to provide a little advanced warning that you will have to pay attention to the pull of the cable.

For HDMI, I would recommend getting one of the really thin cables that are out there.  I have also used the P700 with a much larger, yet still small tripod that extends to about 18 inches in height.  I used it for the photo shoot.  It's a bit heavier and has a much wider stance, due to its size, and that solved the cable pull problem for me.  Save the mini-tripod for travel usage.

PS.  If you look at the photo above in the section on the battery, you can see the bottom of the projector and the tripod screw thread.

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P700 - Gamers are you ready

AAXA touts gaming as one of the things that the P700 projector is good at.  A quick test using the Leo Bodnar input lag testing device showed the P700 measures 35.7 milliseconds.  That's not lightning fast, but anything around 34 ms is considered fast enough to satisfy all but the most hard core, high speed gamers.  From a practical standpoint we're talking a two frame delay on a game projected at 60 frames per second.  By comparison, they say that it takes a driver 250 to 500 ms to move their foot from accelerator to the brake of a car in an emergency.  Some folks spend thousands of dollars on gaming PC's with very expensive graphics cards to reduce the input lag well below those times, but that's true for a tiny percent of the folks gaming.  So, let the games begin.