But, the Elfin suffers in the same ways as the XGIMI Halo when it comes to darker content. It doesn’t provide a lot of detail in the dark, making it hard to see. And, for static areas in the dark, it has the same dithering issue we’d seen before, where we see a color rapidly switching between shades to simulate a color but failing to switch fast enough to be imperceptible. When the Intelligent Screen Alignment feature is enabled, Elfin will automatically adjust the projected image to match a 16:9 or 16:10 screen size. You will be up and running within a couple of minutes, without having to read any instruction manuals.

Despite the differing brightnesses of 400 ISO Lumens for the MoGo 2 Pro nad 800 ANSI Lumens for the Elfin, in practice both projectors are similarly bright.Although best suited for night-time viewing where you’ll have no problems getting a 100-inch picture, the Elfin offers powerful sound and accurate colors, combined with some clever auto-setup options that makes it a treat to use anywhere in the home. Inside the Elfin is a 0.33-inch Full HD DLP chip. As well as displaying flat Full HD, the projector can display HDR10+, even accepting a 4K input that’s downscaled to the projector’s native resolution. Compared with larger projectors that deliver upwards of 2000 ANSI Lumens, 800 might seem like a pretty dark image on paper, but in fact is much brighter than you would expect.

Using the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) standards, 800 ANSI lumens is bright enough for a 130-inch 16:9 image in a dark room using a 1.0 gain screen. In my tests, using Standard power mode and Movie picture mode, which deliver lower brightness than the Elfin's maximum, the image was easily bright enough to light up my 90-inch screen in the dark and in low levels of ambient light. In a family room with lots of windows, it was suitably bright to fill an 80-inch screen in moderate ambient light at night and remain watchable—if somewhat washed out—on a bright afternoon. Smart portable projectors often come with compromises that are hard to swallow. The resolution is not what was advertised. The processor is too slow. There aren’t enough features. It wobbles. The Elfin is still just a 1080p projector, though, so it does fall a little bit short when going for the extreme projection sizes. Jagged edges on text and simple geometric shapes are quite apparent at large sizes, and sometimes those jagged edges can appear on even straight vertical or horizontal imagery because of the contortions from keystone correction.

It’s very clever and means that no matter where you plug in the Elfin, you’ll get the best picture possible. Of course, you can override the settings if you want manual control. Performance Speaking of, the included remote handles all interfacing with the Android TV 10.0 operating system installed, and the remote does a fine job, though the system can be a little slow to react to Google Assistant commands. The interface is fairly intuitive, but XGIMI has still failed to deliver Netflix support. Go to "System Setup" -- "Projector Settings" -- "Focus Settings" -- "Auto Focus" -- "Startup/Auto Focus upon Motion" Looking at the above image, you can clearly see a more purple tint to the MoGo Pro 2 when compared with the Elfin, which gives much richer colors.