Vivitek Qumi Q7 LED Projector - Review

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Art Feierman

Qumi Q7 LED Projector with 800 lumens - this projector is suitable for portable business and education use, digital signage and for home entertainment. Impressive! For the most part LED projectors until recently were limited to small pico and pocket projectors mostly with 10 to 500 lumens. There have been exceptions, we've reviewed a few expensive LED projectors in the past 4-5 years, including an LG for $15,000 and a Viewsonic for around $3000, but we're finally starting to see some serious LED projectors in the sub-$1000 price range, ($999 list price in this case), that have respectable brightness. The latest Qumi from Vivitek is definitely a serious projector. The Q7 projector is bright enough for many business and classroom uses, and is on paper bright enough to produce a 100" diagonal image in a darkened room in your home, for your personal home entertainment, be it HDTV, Netflix, Blu-ray, or Gaming. Resolution is 720p, or rather the "business" resolution of WXGA which is 1280x800, slightly higher than 720p (1280x720), which means it can run 720p natively - no compression. I expect, though that the largest potential for sales of the Q7 will not be for the home, perhaps corporate sales forces or training departments.

Specs Preview

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Vivitek Qumi Q7 Specs
Price	999
Technology	DLP
Native Resolution	1280x800
Brightness (Manufacturer Claim)	800
Contrast	30000:1
Zoom Lens Ratio	1.10:1
Lens Shift	No
Lamp Life	30000 hours
Weight	3.1
Warranty	2 years P/L

Qumi Q7 Projector Overview

First off, this is an LED projector. The Q7 is a very bright, very small LED projector! The LED aspect is the solid state light source, no lamps to change. Vivitek says this projector's light source is good for 30,000 hours. Folks, that's close to forever in the life of a projector. Almost every owner, home or business or education will find it to be obsolete long before the light source wears out. Consider, the typical road warrior projector for business - and the Q7 qualifies for that description, doesn't get many hours a week use - 12 hours a week maximum? And don't kid yourself, the Q7 is a road warrior's dream. Enough to present to dozens of people in a typical conference room, but only weighing in at 3.1 pounds (and no separate power brick to add to weight and bulk. And it's small and slim!

Should the Qumi Q7 make it into a classroom, even if heavily used, that's maybe 20 hours a week, but mostly a lot less. Now in the home, if you are a hard core gamer, and you watch TV and movies and internet on it, then maybe, just maybe you could hit 60 hours a week (having a family will help). So, what do those work out to: Portable at 12 hours - 50 years. Classroom (or business install) at 20 hours/week - 30 years. Hard core gaming and home entertainment - max of 60 hours a week (10 years!) 10 years, by then, this projector's resolution will be ancient (this is 800 lines of resolution, the world will be at 8000 lines of resolution in less than a decade.

There is only one exception I can think of, that might test the 30,000 hours, and that would be using this projector for digital signage where it might run 16 or even 24 hours a day, 365...

Even at 16 hours a day, every day, we're talking over five years.

The light source may be LED, but, the "engine" of the projector is a typical single chip DLP. As is common on pico and pocket projectors (this one is a bit larger than a typical pocket projector, but the names are interchangeable), the Qumi has a built in media player, and can do all kinds of presentations without needing a computer, or a video source.

What the Q7 does not offer, is a battery option, either internal or external. Some smaller, less powerful Qumi projectors do have those options.

There's plenty of USB options, and one of the two HDMI ports supports MHL, for plugging in devices such as Roku sticks. The Q7 is 3D compatible, but there's lots more, including optional Wifi dongle! Let's summarize the highlights next and discuss more of the special features.