It’s one of the few projectors at all that are available to give you Dolby Vision, if that’s one of your must-have features. The triple laser means you get huge images and still have great brightness—it’s awe-inspiring.
On the other hand: don’t buy this for gaming. Not only does it not support higher refresh rates at all, but the input lag is also such that you will notice it, and it does sometimes feel like you’ve dropped your controller in a vat of treacle. If you’re not playing competitively or very much a casual gamer only, then go ahead and buy this primarily for movies. With a dedicated game mode, it’s better than some laser projectors, but it’s still not ideal. I can’t recommend this if gaming is your primary use case.
At around $3000, the Formovie Theater certainly isn’t for anyone on a budget, but compared to other triple laser projectors, it’s actually one of the most value-packed.
Read on to find out what we thought of the Formovie Theater, and don’t forget to check out the review video above to see it in action.
Who is Formovie?
Formovie is probably not a name you’ve heard before, but it’s backed by Xiaomi (who you have probably heard of), and Appotronics. The latter has plenty of experience producing commercial laser projection systems for cinemas, so the collaboration is sure to yield good results.
What’s the big deal about having three lasers though? Cheaper laser projectors use a single laser as the light source, which is then split into three beams to produce the component parts of the image. This can sometimes result in a slight rainbow effect with bright white contrasts. Triple laser systems instead use individual colored lasers for each component, usually resulting in a wider array of colors and an overall brighter picture. The triple laser system gives the Formovie Theater its 2800-lumen rated brightness.
However, not everyone prefers the color gamut from triple lasers, so it’s not as clear cut as one is definitely better than the other. Triple laser systems are certainly brighter, though.
Formovie Theater Design and Specifications
The Formovie Theater doesn’t break any conventions when it comes to laser TV design: it’s a massive great slab that’s intended to be sat on a table next to your wall, rather than ceiling mounted or projected from behind you. It’s blocky, with square corners, and lacks any real design flourishes or differentiation. It’s about as generic-looking as you can get.
Formovie claims the Theater can output 2800 lumens maximum brightness, which is definitely on the higher end for home projection. It’s not the brightest, but still very impressive and more than enough for watching on a reasonably sized screen in the daytime. Although I don’t have a light meter to test the claims, it lines up with what I’d expect and have experience from similarly rated devices.
Utilizing a triple laser system—meaning the red green and blue are separately projected—it delivers a 3000:1 contrast ratio for excellent blacks and ensures you won’t see any rainbow artifacts as you can with cheaper single laser systems.
The Formovie Theater is also one of the first home projectors to support Dolby Vision, which is an even better form of HDR, similar to HDR10+ but more widely supported. I say more widely supported, unfortunately, I don’t have any media encoded in Dolby Vision, so I tested with only regular HDR content.
Input and Ports
Around the back you’ll find three HDMI 2.1 ports (one of which has eARC for sending audio back to your AV receiver should you opt to use the built-in Android system to play content), two USB-A ports, a 3.5mm stereo line out, TOS optical audio out, and finally, a LAN port. I have an access point in my home cinema, so I’ve been testing exclusively on 5Ghz Wi-Fi. It’s a good selection of ports, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Throw Ratio and Projection Size
Laser TVs are generally designed to sit on a low table or sideboard directly next to a wall. You should expect to get at least a 75-inch image easily. The fact it can sit so close to the intended projection surface is due to the ultra-short throw lens system, which produces a throw ratio of around 0.23:1. It’s not an exact science, but it roughly means that, for example, at 23cm from the wall, you’d get a 1-meter wide image.
However, I opted to put it on the floor, just so I could really push the projection size to its limit. The largest I could achieve was with the front of the projector around 16 inches from the wall; this resulted in a 116-inch wide image (295cm). The only thing restricting me at this point was my ceiling height. Like most laser TVs, the Formovie Theater has a roughly 100% vertical offset, so a foot from the projection surface means the image begins about a foot up from the projector.
Even at just under three meters wide, I never found the image brightness to be an issue. In daylight, it was visible enough to use, though the best results with any projector will be had at night.
Image Quality
Of course, the most important aspect of any projector is the image quality. For reference, all my projectors are tested on a chalk-painted white wall, which I find is an excellent surface without hotspots that you might get from typical silk emulsion.
Most content on the Formovie Theater looks stunning—but particularly older 1080p SDR content, it does a superb job of upscaling that and really making the details and colors pop. Whether that was for realistic landscapes, sci-fi space scenes, or saturated cartoons—it all looked amazing. In comparison to other projectors, the black levels were overall superb, though they’re still not comparable to an OLED TV.
However, I then tried to test out some 4K HDR content, both via the built-in Android TV running Plex app, or via a local Plex client on a PC with Windows set to HDR color mode—and something just didn’t feel right. No matter how I tweaked the built-in settings, it wasn’t as good as I was expecting HDR content to be. The wide color ranges didn’t feel, well, that wide. They didn’t feel that gloriously colorful. They didn’t feel as dynamic as I knew they should. It’s possible that I had some wrong settings, but after resetting everything to defaults and trying again with various tweaks, it still just didn’t feel right. It wasn’t bad by any means, but to my eyes, the SDR content looked better.
Still, I might just be nitpicking at this point, and things like color profiles or image calibration is a subjective topic. Overall, it’s a superb image, and of course, it depends a lot on the quality of your source material. Had I been streaming Dolby Vision from Disney+, things might have looked better.
Gaming on the Formovie Theater I also found to be a mixed experience. As a general rule, laser TVs have a higher-than-average input latency. That’s the delay between when an action occurs (or more specifically, when the video signal for that action is sent to the output device) and when it actually appears on your display. Image processing in the hardware and software is what contributes to this.
On the Formovie Theater, the latency is around 42ms at 4K 60Hz with game mode enabled. That’s not nearly as bad as some laser TVs, but it’s teetering on the bounds of what most gamers will find acceptable. Anything above 50ms is too slow. Below 20ms is good. 42ms is acceptable for some light gaming, but definitely not for twitchy or competitive gaming.
We tried some sessions of Minecraft Dungeons on PC, and having used the BenQ x3000i for the past month with its superb 12ms of input lag, the difference was noticeable. Additionally, there was a lot of screen tearing, and if you enable software V-sync to fix it, you end up with more input lag.
I also tried Call of Duty via the PlayStation 5, and again, it was much the same story there. While it supports glorious 4K HDR at 60hz, and the game looks stunning, I did somewhat feel the lag and ended up with somewhat middling to low scores—which I assure you, isn’t normal.
The incredible clarity and color range offered by the Formovie Theater works well for casual gaming like Lego Bricktales, bringing each brick to life. But this isn’t suitable for shooters, beat ’em-ups, or dungeon crawlers.
Finally, on the subject of gaming, I will also add that getting the 4K to work was buggy at times: both the PS5 and Windows would frequently drop back to 1080p, claiming that 4K or HDR was not supported. Unplugging the HDMI cable and restarting tended to fix this, but hopefully, this is a firmware issue that can be fixed.
Audio
Let’s touch on audio briefly because if you’ve spent $3000 on a high-end cinema projector, realistically, you’re not going to use the built-in speakers as anything except a stopgap measure until your actual sound system is delivered. But the Formovie Theater does have some nice hefty speakers, tuned by Bowers and Wilkins, and it supports virtual Dolby Atmos.
Surprisingly, the audio quality is impressive—as good as a mid-range soundbar, anyway. Compared to a ceiling-mounted projector, you’re also benefitting from the fact it’s facing you from the front. There’s a fair degree of stereo separation, and it gets very loud. Dare I say it even has decent bass levels? At no point was I left wanting for volume, which is unusual for a built-in sound system; my ears couldn’t handle more than 75%.
I also appreciated the additional options on sound output, such as voice enhancer (a glorified EQ preset, perhaps, but it works).
Software and UI
Built into the device is Android TV 11. If you’ve used Google TV on any other device, you’ll be right at home here, with a wide variety of apps available and a reasonable responsive interface. However, like a lot of projectors with built-in Android TV, it’s also unlicensed for a host of apps—such as Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and All4. Even more annoying is that it gives you the option to install Netflix during setup as a recommended app, but shows an error if you try to run it.
It does support Apple TV+ and Disney+ for 4K HDR streaming, but if Netflix is your main provider of choice, you’ll need to buy a Chromecast Ultra, Roku, or other officially supported streaming stick. That’s not a deal-breaker for me, as the most important aspect of a projector is the output capabilities. Most people with a home cinema will have this plugged into their AV receiver, but you can work around the Android TV deficiencies by casting from your smartphone if you need to.
Although the core Android TV UI felt responsive and familiar, the extended projector settings and hardware integration were frustrating. I mentioned the issue of 4K signals not being detected, but the Wi-Fi often failed, needing me to unplug and power it on again. You could use the LAN port, but you shouldn’t need to, and I don’t have this issue with other Wi-Fi devices, given the access point is in the same room.
The power-on sequence can be frustrating too—I found the power button to be quite delayed sometimes, so it’ll take a minute or two before you’re launched and ready again. It’s one of those anxiety-inducing moments when you think you’ve broken a $3000 bit of loaned equipment.
None of these minor niggles alone are deal-breaking, but all of those little bugs combined make for a less-than-premium experience when the pricing is decidedly premium. Hopefully, they improve with future firmware updates, or my experience has been unique.
Should You Buy the Formovie Theatre?
$3000 certainly isn’t cheap, but it does compare favorably with similarly specced projectors. Notably, others with a triple laser system are upwards of $3000 to $5000. This will give you the brightest image you’ll find in a $3000 projector if that’s what your budget is and you don’t mind it being a relatively unknown brand.
It’s one of the few projectors at all that are available to give you Dolby Vision, if that’s one of your must-have features. The triple laser means you get huge images and still have great brightness—it’s awe-inspiring to behold.
On the other hand: don’t buy this for gaming. Not only does it not support higher refresh rates at all, but the input lag is also such that you will notice it, and it does sometimes feel like you’ve dropped your controller in a vat of treacle. If you’re not playing competitively or very much a casual gamer only, then go ahead and buy this primarily for movies. With a dedicated game mode, it’s better than some laser projectors, but it’s still not ideal. I can’t recommend this if gaming is your primary use case.
