TMY Mini Projector Review: Honest Notes From Our Weekly Date Night

I bought the TMY mini projector in the first week of February, along with four other things, because Walt and I had run out of things to say over dinner. Thirty-three years of marriage and we'd gotten to the point where Thursday went like this: eat, clear the plates, turn on the TV, phones out, bed by nine-thirty. Not a crisis. Just a rut with a schedule.

So we made a rule. Thursday is ours. Phones go in the kitchen drawer. And about once or twice a month, when neither of us has the energy for anything more ambitious than a bowl of popcorn, the TMY projector goes on the wall in the bedroom and we watch something on the loveseat. Nine months in, roughly a dozen movie nights, and I have opinions. Some of them are about the picture quality. Some of them are about the fact that I now know how to hang a screen level, which is a life skill I did not have in February.

How I've Used It

Let me be plain about the setup, because I think this is where the honest part lives. We use it in the bedroom, on the wall across from the loveseat at the foot of the bed. The included 80 inch foldable screen hangs there with the little hooks it came with. Walt hung it. It took him about fifteen minutes and one mild disagreement about whether it was straight. It was not straight. It is now.

A streaming stick goes in the HDMI port on the back. That is the whole installation. There is a remote with it, which is good, because I am not the person who wants to get up and fiddle with buttons once I've settled in with a blanket.

The built-in speaker is thin. Thin enough that the first night we both kept leaning forward like it would help. It did not. So now we plug in a small speaker we already had, and that fixed it entirely. If you do not already own a little speaker, add one to the budget, because the difference between the projector alone and the projector with a speaker is the difference between a movie and a movie with a bad cold.

And here is the thing nobody puts on the box: this is not a television and it does not want to be one. It works only with the lights off or the room kept dim. Ours is a bedroom with one small lamp, so we turn that lamp off and it is fine. We tried it once with the overhead light on. Once.

The first night we ever tried it, we did everything wrong. We left the bedroom lamp on its brightest setting, we set the projector on the bed instead of a flat table so it shifted every time one of us moved, and we ate popcorn in the dark and dropped a good third of it on the comforter. The picture was small and slightly crooked, and Walt kept leaning over to look at the back of the unit as though there might be a switch he'd missed. There wasn't. What we actually needed was a flat surface, a dark room, and the screen hung on the wall before we tried again. We did all three that weekend and it was a completely different experience. I mention it because I think the first night is where a lot of these get boxed back up, and it is not the machine's fault. It is the lamp.

The picture, honestly

The TMY is native 1080P, 1920 by 1080, at 300 lumens with a 10000:1 contrast ratio. I am quoting the listing there, but here's what it means in a bedroom on a Thursday: faces look like faces, dark scenes in a movie are readable, and I can tell what is happening on a moonlit beach without narrating it for Walt.

It is not as bright as the 55 inch TV in the living room. Not close. If you put them side by side you would see it in five seconds. But in a dark room with a glass of something and nobody's phone buzzing, I stopped noticing within about ten minutes, and I am somebody who notices a smudge on a lens from across the room.

We tested it properly in March with a movie that is mostly shadows, one of those slow British mysteries where half the plot happens in an unlit kitchen. That was the night I stopped worrying about it. The dark scenes held. I could see the outline of a man in a doorway and tell which man it was, which is more than I can say for the small television in our kitchen that we have had since the children were in high school. Where it struggles is anything with a bright window in the frame. A beach at noon, a scene shot outdoors in full sun, those go flat and grey. In nine months we have never once chosen to watch a sunny movie on it, and I do not think that is a coincidence. It knows what it is.

The screen that comes with it is the part I did not expect to be grateful for. I had assumed we would just point it at a blank wall and live with it. Blank walls in a brick ranch house are not as cooperative as the internet suggests. A foldable screen that rolls up small and hooks on two nails solved the whole problem, and I did not have to buy it separately.

Setup and the small stuff that adds up

The unit weighs about 100 grams by the listing, which sounds like a misprint and may well be, but the point stands: it is small and light enough that I move it off the dresser and into a drawer when we are not using it. Nothing about it is fixed in place. Mounting options include table, tripod, wall and ceiling, but ours sits on a little side table and has never wanted anything more.

We moved it around a fair amount those first weeks, trying to find the right spot. On the dresser it was too far back and the picture spilled past the edges of the screen. On the floor it pointed up at a strange angle and gave everybody a longer chin. What finally worked was a low side table roughly six feet back from the wall, sitting at about the height of the loveseat, and once we found that spot we never moved it again except to put it away. The listing puts the maximum throw distance at six meters, which is generous for a bedroom, but the shorter distance is the one that gave us the biggest picture with clean edges. If your room is longer than ours you will have more room to play with than we did. If it is smaller, you will be fine, because ours is not a large room either.

The Bluetooth is genuinely useful because you can switch it into speaker mode and use it as a standalone speaker. We do not, because we have the other speaker plugged in, and I would rather not confuse myself at nine at night. But it's there and it works. There is also a 3.5mm jack and USB on the unit.

One thing I will flag: it is a remote control and controller situation, and the remote is small. Ours lives in the drawer with the phones on Thursday and I have twice spent four minutes looking for it while Walt asked, from the loveseat, whether I was coming back. Keep it in one place.

What a movie night actually looks like now

Here is what changed, and it happened slowly enough that I noticed it in hindsight. In February, movie night was an event. We set it up, we fussed, we had opinions about the setup. By spring, it was routine, which is exactly what I wanted. Walt, who is 61 and an HVAC estimator and comes home tired most days, will now say on a Thursday morning, "should we do a movie tonight?" That sentence did not exist a year ago.

There was one Thursday in October I keep thinking about. Walt had a rough week at work, the kind where he comes in the door and does not say anything for twenty minutes. I had already decided we were skipping the movie and calling it an early night. He ate, and then he went and got the projector out of the drawer himself, which he had never done. He set it on the table, plugged the speaker in, and asked what I wanted to watch. We watched something neither of us would have picked alone, and about halfway through he said, out of nowhere, that he had been thinking about the deck and whether we should finally fix the railing. That is the whole point of the thing, as far as I am concerned. Not the movie. The twenty minutes of talking afterward about a railing.

He also fell asleep during the second half of one of them and I did not wake him, which in its own way is a lovely thing. A projector on a bedroom wall is not a theater. It is a permission slip to sit next to your husband for two hours without a screen in your hand.

We have not watched anything loud or action-heavy on it. Our taste runs to slow movies and British mystery series, which this handles better than I expected. The dim scenes in those are the hard test, and it passes, though "passes with the lights off" is the honest phrasing.

The connection to the rest of our Thursday

Something to be clear on: the TMY is about once or twice a month, not every week. On the other Thursdays we do fondue at the kitchen table about twice a month, and we pull cards from the deck almost every week, and some weeks we play a board game and I lose. The projector is the special-occasion one. It is the one that needs the room dark and the hanging screen and the speaker found and the popcorn made.

That is not a knock. It is a description of the job it does. If you want a thing that turns a room into a movie theater once a month, this is a good use of your money. If you want it as a replacement for the living room television, I would not, and I will get into that below.

A projector on a bedroom wall is not a theater. It is a permission slip to sit next to your husband for two hours without a screen in your hand.

The number I keep coming back to is the review count. At the time I bought it, there were north of twenty-two thousand ratings on it and the average sat around 4.3. I read a good number of them before deciding, and the pattern in the critical ones matched what I found myself: people who expected television brightness were disappointed, and people who set it up in a dark room were happy. That is not a defect. That is two different products in one listing.

Who This Is For

This is for you if you have a room you can darken and two people who want to sit in it together. It is for the couple who has a television in the living room and does not want the date night to happen in the same chair where you watch the news. It is for somebody who wants the movie night to feel a little bit like an occasion and does not want to build a screening room to get there.

It also suits a small space. Our bedroom is not large, the screen is 80 inches, and the whole thing sits comfortably in the room. If you have a bigger room, measure from where you would put the table to the wall before you buy, because the further back you go the bigger the picture gets, and you want to be able to fill the screen without running past it.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you want to watch during the day, if your room has a window you cannot cover, or if you are thinking of this as a cheaper television. It is not a television. I say that with affection, because we like ours and we will keep using it, but the list of people this disappoints is a long and predictable one, and it is made of people who wanted a TV.

Skip it too if you do not want to think about a speaker. The plug-in speaker is not optional in our house. And skip it if a routine of hauling it out and finding the remote and making the popcorn sounds like work rather than ritual, because there is a little bit of ritual to it, and that is either the charm or the chore depending on your temperament.