The Anker Nebula Mars 3 ($1,049.99) is a room-to-room-to-outdoor projector, with an emphasis on the outdoor part. Much like the Anker Nebula Cosmos Laser 4K, it's reminiscent of a car battery with a handle on top. However, it's not just a lower-resolution (1080p) clone of its 4K relative. The Mars isn't quite as tall or as heavy as the Cosmos, and it depends on an LED light source instead of a laser one. It's also more rugged than the Cosmos is, with ratings for water, drop, and dust resistance that are sure to come in handy for outdoor use. Add in high image and audio quality, and you get our first-ever Editors' Choice pick for an outdoor portable projector.
Design: Easy to Hold, Hard to Break
At 9.9 pounds and measuring 9.8 by 6.3 by 10.2-inches (HWD), the Mars 3 is a little heavy for a portable battery-powered projector, but it's typical for a room-to-room portable model, a category defined as having good enough onboard audio so you don't need to lug an external sound system with you. The Mars 3 easily qualifies on that score, both in terms of its sound quality and volume, which is more than enough to fill a large family room or for use outdoors. And unlike most room-to-room portables such as the Epson Mini EF12, our top pick among room-to-room portables for indoor use, it adds a handle on top to make it a lot easier to carry.
Although it would be a stretch to call the Mars 3 fully rugged, it's more rugged than most projectors. It's rated IPX3 water resistant, which translates to surviving a 5-minute spray of water, so it should survive all but the most torrential of downpours. It's also rated to survive drops onto a cement floor from half a meter (about 19.7 inches), and the bottom is designed to be dust resistant—or more precisely, resistant to particles as small as 0.7 millimeter. In short, it will survive rougher treatment than most projectors, which can pay off if your backyard movie night gets cut short by a rain shower, for example, or the projector gets bounced around in the back of your car. And if you place it on the ground outside, it's reasonably safe from particles getting into the case.
(Credit: Anker)Inside the box, there's a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel DLP chip and an LED light source rated at 25,000 hours in full-power mode. Also inside are the already-mentioned sound system and the battery. The sound system takes advantage of a 40-watt, three-way speaker (meaning there are separate drivers, or components, for high, midrange, and low frequencies) plus Dolby Digital Plus. The battery is rated at 2 hours in full-power mode for video, 5 hours in Eco mode, and 15 hours for audio only when serving as a Bluetooth speaker. The projector can also serve as a power bank to charge other devices.
One minor annoyance for viewing is that the battery's power status light—a circle of white LEDs—sits on the handle, so it's at the top of the projector, on the back of the unit. If you're sitting behind it in dim or dark lighting, the bright white lights can be distracting. Anker says it will add a menu command to dim the light in a future firmware update. In the meantime, a good workaround (which I used for my tests) is to paste on one or more small sticky notes. A single note dimmed the LED circle to a tolerable level. Adding a second note over the first hid it entirely.
(Credit: Anker)Physical setup requires little more than pointing the projector at whatever you're using for a screen and turning it on. Connecting a power cord is optional, as long as the battery is charged, as is connecting cables from a video source to the one HDMI port. There's also a USB-C and a USB Type-A port available for charging or powering other devices. Initial Android TV 11 setup is standard, and requires a Wi-Fi connection to the internet. Note also that in addition to serving as a Bluetooth speaker itself, the Mars 3 can connect to another Bluetooth speaker for output, and it includes an audio delay adjustment should the video and sound fall out of sync.
Beyond the physical setup, the Mars 3 offers automatic keystone adjustments and digital zoom. It also can automatically fit its image to match the size of whatever you're using for a screen. In my tests, all of these features worked as promised. The auto focus also worked nicely, but sometimes required rerunning it a second or third time to get sharp focus. Still, as with any projector, you might want to ignore these automatic adjustment features, since they lower image brightness and can introduce artifacts.
Testing the Nebula Mars 3: Good Image Quality
As is increasingly common for native 1080p projectors, the Mars 3 negotiates a 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) connection by default when possible, so it effectively behaves like a 4K projector with soft focus. In my tests, however, it had problems connecting with some sources that were set to 1080p. When connecting to a Verizon Fios box, for example, it usually connected at 1080p, but once negotiated a 720p connection instead. It also repeatedly failed to connect with the Bodnar meter I use for testing input lag at 1080p, reporting "no signal."
Anker says it is looking into the problem to see if it's a compatibility issue that a future firmware upgrade can fix. In the meantime, if you run into it, the easy workaround is to set the video source to 4K or 720p. Even the Bodnar meter worked using 4K/60Hz input, reporting a 26.6-millisecond input lag, which is suitable for casual gaming.
(Credit: Anker)The Mars 3 menus offer four predefined modes with no adjustment options, plus one Picture Custom mode with settings for Contrast, Saturation, Sharpness, Color Temperature, Wall Color, and Gamma. The brightest mode, Bright, adds a green tint, but is in the range that most people will consider tolerable if they need the extra brightness. The others are all more than acceptable by most people's standards. Picture Custom takes on the setting of whatever mode you were just using before switching to it, so whatever your preferred choice among the predefined settings is, be sure you're in that mode before switching to Picture Custom.
For my tests using 1080p SDR input, I chose Movie as the starting point, then turned off the frame interpolation. I would have also switched to Picture Custom to adjust the brightness, which was a touch too high, but there's no standard Brightness setting available. (There's one that's labeled as Brightness, but it sets the LED brightness, rather than the picture brightness.) The default settings offered good enough color accuracy that I wouldn't have spotted any issues if I weren't so familiar with our test clips, and shadow detail held nicely. When viewing in a dark room, dark scenes weren't as visually dramatic as they would be with a darker black level, but that wasn't obvious with even a low level of ambient light.
(Credit: Anker)The Mars 3 also handled 4K HDR input reasonably well, down-converting the resolution to 1080p and keeping the high dynamic range (HDR). Using default settings, the image lacked contrast, but boosting the Contrast setting in Picture Custom mode solved that problem. The only issue is that the projector uses the same settings for HDR and SDR, so if you want different settings for each, you have to keep changing each setting back and forth when you switch between the two kinds of input. That said, after tweaking the contrast, the picture quality was close to matching the SDR quality, except that bright scenes were perhaps a touch darker. I didn't see any noticeable improvement in shadow detail, but it was so good when using SDR input that there wasn't much room—or need—for improvement.
Note that although there is no 3D support in the unit I tested, Anker Nebula says it will be added in an upcoming firmware update. Very much on the plus side, I saw almost no rainbow artifacts (red/green/blue flashes), and I tend to see them easily when present on a projector. You may be even more sensitive to them than I am, however. If you're concerned with the issue, you'll need to test the projector for yourself. Anker accepts returns for any reason within 30 days of purchase, although you'll have to pay for the return shipping.
(Credit: Anker)Anker rates the Mars 3's brightness at 1,000 ANSI lumens. For the settings I used for testing, the image brightness for both SDR and HDR input was close to what I expect from about 550 lumens—easily bright enough to light up my 90-inch, 1.0-gain screen in a dark room, or my 80-inch screen in the level of ambient light typical for a family room at night. It was also watchable (but washed out) on my 80-inch screen on a bright afternoon.
Verdict: An Otherworldly Outdoor Projector
To say that the Anker Nebula Mars 3 is the most impressive projector we've seen for outdoor use doesn't mean as much as it might, since so few competing models offer water, dust, and drop resistance, plus an onboard battery. The BenQ GS50—which has a lower level of water resistance and a lower brightness at a lower cost—is one of the few.
But not having much competition also means the Mars 3 is nearly unique, and that's pretty impressive by itself. Even if you're not interested in it as an outdoor projector, it's still a good choice for strictly indoor room-to-room use, where the battery power and ruggedness are nice but not essential extras.
If rainbow artifacts are an issue for you, be sure to also consider the Epson Mini EF12, which offers a laser light source and a guarantee of being free of rainbows, though it doesn't handle HDR as well as the Mars 3 does. Or, if you want 4K resolution and are willing to pay extra for it, consider the Cosmos Laser 4K or the BenQ GP500, our current top pick for a 4K room-to-room portable. Between them, the Cosmos Laser 4K is brighter, while the GP500 scored better for image quality on our tests.
Ultimately, if 1080p is the resolution you want, the Mars 3 deserves a close look, and if you need a projector to use outdoors, it can be a compelling choice.
