XGIMI Z4 Aurora Home Theater Projector: Detailed Review

The XGIMI Z4 Aurora Home Theater DLP projector is a product of XGIMI, a high-tech company located in mainland of Chengdu in China with its focus on designing, developing, producing and marketing of high-performance multifunctional projectors.

The company has a wide range of projectors of great quality, stylish designs, and of reasonable prices. While they produce projectors with all-around purposes, XGIMI also manufactures usage-specific projectors – projectors to be used in education, entertainment, business and many other industries.

The XGIMI Z4 Aurora projector, for example, is an entertainment-focused projector that is specifically manufactured to be used in houses as a home entertainment system. The Z4 Aurora is an Android-powered home theatre projector that can pretty much connect to any device out there: TV Boxes, Chromecast, Phones, Tablets, PS4, X-Box, Laptops, etc. In addition, its support for 4K, 3D video, and gesture control will make the Z4 Aurora a super addition to your home entertainment system.

Let’s highlight some basics of the Z4 Aurora under the headers below.

Design and form factor

The XGIMI Z4 Aurora projector comes in a square-shaped silver-colored hard plastic enclosure and sports a black circular disc at the top – an aesthetic property that gives it a record player appearance. If this is anywhere in your house, a random visitor who has no idea what it is might take the XGIMI Z4 Aurora as a record player.

With a 19.50 x 19.50 x 4.50 cm dimension and 1.2 kg weight, the XGIMI Z4 Aurora wasn’t designed with portability in mind, but to be kept in a certain position in your home – not carried about. Besides, don’t be fooled, the silver coating on the body of the projector makes it seem like it is made from metal. In the real sense of it, the hard plastic material is a bit fragile and may get broken in the course of frequent movement and position change.

The lens and the speaker are the only occupants of the front’s real estate in the Z4 Aurora projector. And just below the lens, there is a knob that acts as the slider control for the lens cover.

The speaker on this projector is a Harman/Kardon speaker manufactured by HARMAN, a company specializing in the production of top-quality audio products. In addition, the quality and intensity of sound emitted from the small speaker are enough to fill a whole room. This isn’t the regular speakers you find on projectors – you’d be amazed.

At the bottom, the XGIMI Z4 Aurora projector comes with three padded feet. These feet can be detached and replaced with a tripod stand that ships with the product out of the box.

Gesture Control

Moving on, let’s talk about the black “disc” at the top of the Z4 Aurora. Though the disc seems more like an aesthetic addition, it isn’t. The disc is a gesture support mechanism through which you can swirl your hands around it in clockwise and anticlockwise fashion to either increase or decrease the projector’s volume.

While this is innovative, it is likewise redundant. You can easily control volume with the remote, plus you won’t have to sit close to the projector to get it done.

Stunning remote control

Speaking of the remote, it’s one of a kind. Again, this isn’t the regular AAA battery-powered remote you find in budget and mid-range projectors; this is high-end. The remote is slim and also made from hard silver-colored plastic.

Through the remote, you can control volume, focus, and navigate around the projector. The remote is charged and shaking the remote changes it to a mouse cursor (see the embedded video at the bottom of this post).

Lastly, should you misplace the XGIMI Z4 Aurora’s remote, you can easily download the XGIMI remote control app on the Google PlayStore. The app does everything the physical remote does.

Display quality

With a resolution of 1280 x 800, the display quality was good. Colors came out well and in their true forms. Brightness was also impressive, most especially in a dark room. In a lit room, images were faded, and we had to squint our eyes to make sense of the display. This means at 700 ANSI Lumens; the XGIMI Z4 Aurora projector isn’t the adequate projector for use in lit rooms.

Also, XGIMI stated that the Z4 Aurora supports 4K videos, but when we played some 4K contents on the projector, the visual output wasn’t anywhere near the 4K quality.

Furthermore, this projector doesn’t have a dedicated keystone correction wheel because it handles keystone errors pretty well. Keystone correction is automatic, so you have less to worry about.

Connectivity and Multimedia

I mentioned in the introductory paragraph that there are numerous ways to connect to the XGIMI Z4 Aurora projector…and that is no lie. On there rear, you can either connect to the Z4 Aurora via the two USB ports, dual HDMI ports, or via audio-video cable. It is largely disappointing that there is no TF card slot and VGA cable port — these are things you’d find on a $70 projector like the Alfawise A8.

Moving on, wireless connectivity via Bluetooth and WiFi is supported. In the absence of a VGA cable, you can connect your laptop to the projector through this method. On a MacBook, connection via Airplay was smooth and fast.

There a couple of built-in applications to stream multimedia. Applications like Netflix and YouTube will supply unlimited content, as long as you are connected to the internet via WiFi. Also, you can browse for extra content of choice by surfing the net using the built-in browser. There are also a couple of built-in games with the option to download more games on the built-in Aptoide app store.

XGIMI Z4 Aurora projector: Price

Price-wise, the XGIMI Z4 Aurora projector is quite in the high side. To own a unit of this home theatre projector, you gotta be willing to pay $650. And if you purchase on GearBest, it will be shipped to you wherever you are for free.