Formovie Cinema Edge UST projector review

01 September 2024

Formovie Cinema Edge introduction

Formovie might not be a household name in Western markets, but the brand is actually well-established and has quite the pedigree. Formovie is a joint venture between Xiaomi and APPOTRONICS - a world-leading laser display technology company with its own patents and R&D and over 90% market share in the laser cinema space. So we are really talking about some big players here.

The Formovie Cinema Edge projector we are looking at today is a high-end consumer-grade UST unit. It is a 4K UHD projector with an advertised brightness of 2100 ISO lumens and broad HDR standard support. It uses an ALPD single color laser and also has features like MEMC and Wi-Fi 6. There are two 15W speakers on board, with Dolby Audio and DTS-HD certification.

The Formovie Cinema Edge even has some smarts onboard for convenient multimedia playback. There is Google TV running on a MT9629 chipset with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage.

Formovie Cinema Edge specs at a glance:

• Dimensions: 456x308x91mm, 7kg.
• Optical parameters: ALPD RGB+ single color laser (Advanced Laser Phosphor Display) UST (ultra short throw) DLP projector; 4K (UHD) optical resolution (Pixel Shifting); 3000:1 contrast ratio.
• Projection parameters: 2100 ISO lumens (advertised); 80~150-inch screen diagonal; 0.23:1 throw ratio; 110% Rec.709 color space; 60 Hz.
• Optical adjustment: Manual software electric focus; Omnidirectional manual keystone correction (8-point correction) or 4-point keystone correction.
• Audio: Two full-range 15W Hi-Fi speakers; Audio output via 3.5mm jack (stereo) and multichannel ARC over HDMI and optical S/PDIF; Dolby Audio, DTS-HD audio decoding.
• Internals: MediaTek MT9629 (4xCortex-A55 @ 1.5 GHz); Mali-G52 2EE MC1 GPU ; 2GB of RAM; 32GB storage.
• Hardware video decoder: Up to 4K video with 10bit color depth support; AV1, AVS2, HEVC, VP9, H.264, SHVC 4K60@10bit; HDR (Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG decoding); Widevine L1 (HD and greater streaming);
• I/O: Internal power supply with AC 110-240V support; 2xUSB 2.0 Type-A; 3xHDMI 2.1 (full-sized with eARC support on 1 port); 1x3.5mm stereo audio output jack; S/PDIF optical multi-channel audio output; 1xRG45 Lan port; Far-field microphone setup for voice assistant.
• Wireless connectivity: Dual-band Wi-Fi 6; Bluetooth 5.0.
• Software: Google TV with Google services; Built-in Chromecast support and Google voice assistant.
• Other features: Far-field voice control; Remote control in box; Wireless projection support (Chromecast); MEMC; Automatic low latency mode for gaming.

The Formovie Cinema Edge is also rich in I/O with far-field microphones for the built-in Google Assistant. Also, three HDMI 2.1 ports, two USB 2.0 ones, an RG45 lan port, 3.5mm audio jack and S/PDIF optical out.

Unboxing

The Formovie Cinema Edge arrived in a massive cardboard box containing the slightly smaller but still massive product box. The inner box is made of thick cardboard and has a lot of compression foam on the inside, which is great for protecting the unit in transport. It also features a carrying handle, making it perfect for transporting the Formovie Cinema Edge. We wouldn't necessarily suggest lugging around the massive projector too often, but if you plan to definitely keep the box around.

The contents include the projector itself and the proprietary remote. The latter doesn't even come with batteries, which is odd but not a major issue. Also in the box is a standard three-prong AC power supply cable like what you would find on a two-piece laptop charger. It plugs directly into the back of the Formovie Cinema Edge since its power converter is built in. That means less cable clutter, which we always appreciate. The only other things in the box are a user manual and some other documentation.

Hardware, ports and remote

Measuring 456x308x91mm and tipping the scale at 7kg, the Formovie Cinema Edge is formidable. The projector itself feels very reassuringly dense and stays firmly in place. It won't just skit around if you accidentally bump it or the table you've placed it on.

We were happy to find out that the Formovie Cinema Edge has height-adjustable feet on the bottom side. Well, rather on either side. That means that you don't need to rely on keystone corrections alone. It is always best to physically level and position a projector as best as possible before applying any other image fixes since those tend to take away from quality.

In terms of looks, we would probably describe the Formovie THEATER as rocking a traditional industrial design. It doesn't feel overly modern nor deliberately retro and should fit in just fine as part of any media cabinet.

The bulk of the unit is made of plastic. It has a matte finish, which does smudge and scratch rather easily, so you need to take care of the unit. Not that it will be a problem as the ultra-short throw projectors sit far away from you - just use the appropriate cloths for the dust wiping and you'll be fine.

There are at least a couple of fans inside the Formovie Cinema Edge, but the noise from them is very quiet and pretty much inaudible, even with prolonged use. And again, you are extremely unlikely to hear it from the distance. Any noise the fans make gets easily drowned out by the excellent audio setup.

The Formovie Cinema Edge has two full-range speakers. We believe that both are positioned on the front of the unit, behind the hard plastic mesh. Though, some of the sound also gets directed sideways.

The Formovie Cinema Edge sounds truly great. Plenty of bass is available, and the sound stage is rich and full. Even the directionality of Dolby Atmos content is pretty convincing.

The top of the unit looks very slick, with just a single big slit for the business end of the optics and projection and a couple of sensors. Unfortunately, there is no protection available against dust and other contaminants. We would have appreciated a flap of some sort to keep the up-facing optics clean when not in use. The power button for the unit is also positioned on the top.

All of the ports on the Formovie Cinema Edge are found around the back, which is great for cable management, if not the best for convenience. A front-facing USB port would have been appreciated. With three full sized HDMI ports, you can successfully use the Formovie Cinema Edge as the central hub of your multimedia setup. Just one of the ports supports eARC (HDMI 3), which is fine in our books. We got it to work nicely with a Samsung home theater setup for multichannel audio output.

However, the Formovie Cinema Edge lacks CEC, which meant that we still had to control the volume of our surround sound with its own remote control - an annoying omission. We were also kind of perplexed as to why the HDMI ports are version 2.1. Not that we are complaining about getting recent tech standards, the 4K@60Hz Formovie THEATER can't benefit from the extra bandwidth of the HDMI 2.1 standard.

The USB-A ports available on the Formovie Cinema Edge are both USB 2.0, meaning a theoretical speed cap of 480Mbps. Seeing how you are most likely to attach an external hard drive or SSD to said ports and consume multimedia off of it, USB 2.0 speeds are perfectly adequate, even for modern 4K content.

Both the LAN port and S/PDIF optical audio output are great to see and offer added flexibility in the case of the latter and better internet connection stability for the former. The 3.5mm audio jack is also welcome, even though it would definitely be our last choice for outputting audio from the Formovie Cinema Edge.

The remote control for the Formovie Cinema Edge is fairly basic, but it works great for navigating the Google TV OS. You get a dediceted YouTube button, which is convenient and a button to trigger the Google voice assistant. There seems to be no microphone built into the remote itself. Instead, the far-field microphones on the projector will pick up your voice.

What is an ultra-short-throw projector, and why would you want one?

An ultra-short-throw projector, or UST, needs very little space between it and the projection surface to cast a large format image. This is achieved via ultra-wide lenses, light sources, and lens arrangements, which can be quite challenging to pull off. A projector needs to have a throw ratio of less than 0.4:1 to qualify as UST.

This kind of setup is desirable for several reasons. First, there is the question of space. You need a big room with a traditional projector to get a decent-sized image. You can use this calculator to get an idea. Most traditional projectors tend to have a 2:1 throw ratio - you need to have the projector about 5 meters away from a surface to get a 100-inch image. With its 0.23:1 ratio, the Formovie Cinema Edge can get an 80-inch image while placed just 14 centimeters away from the projection surface and a 150-inch one at 49 centimeters.

That allows you to have the projector in front of you and make better use of any onboard speaker system it might have while also keeping the noise from its cooling system as far away as possible.

Also, a UST projector is typically meant to cast up from a surface, like a table or a media cabinet, whereas you typically want to mount a standard projector on the ceiling to get the best image with the least amount of distortion that the quality-damaging keystone correction needs to fix. That means installation is normally far easier. That being said, the Formovie Cinema Edge also has standard mounting holes on the bottom if you feel like mounting it on the ceiling.

Why is ALPD the next major step?

Let's get some basics down for anyone unfamiliar with current projector tech trends. In very simple terms, there are a couple of main ways to get the light needed to project an image. The original solution of old is using a bulb of some sort. The most common technology out there is based on metal halide and UHP (Ultra High Performance) lamps, which are technologies dating back to the 1960s. These types of projectors frequently require maintenance on things like filters, and the lamp would have a life expectancy of around 3,000 hours. An alternative to these lamps is using an LED light source, which lasts significantly longer - around 25,000 hours. Then, there is the best currently available light source option: a laser.

The Formovie Cinema Edge is an ALDP projector, which stands for Advanced Laser Phosphor Display, which is the most advanced fluorescent laser technology currently. Laser projection basically has all of the benefits of LED projection - the light source is compact and energy efficient and allows for easier non-standard optical angles, which is precisely what the ultra-short-throw optics on the Formovie Cinema Edge are.

You also get the benefits of virtually zero maintenance and around 25,000 hours of life expectancy for the light source. One of the major benefits of laser projection over LED is the availability of significantly brighter light output (theoretically up to 30,000 lumens).

Laser projectors are typically available in either single-laser or three-laser varieties. In a single laser projector, all primary colors need to be derived by separating them from a single laser beam with a color wheel. This has certain disadvantages, like blue tinting and occasionally a color rainbow effect on fast-moving images. Also, the color wheel itself is frequently prone to producing a high-pitched whine. Still, we would gladly take an advanced DLP laser setup over anything else, even a single laser one.

Projection performance, features and settings

The Formovie Cinema Edge definitely is a high-performing unti. The first impression can be quite striking if you haven't experienced an UST projector before. If you push the projector right up against a wall or other surface, you already end up with an image of 40 inches or so in diagonal. With a ratio of 0.23:1, you only need 14cm from the wall to get an 80-inch picture, 33cm for 120 inches, and at 49cm away from the wall, you can get 150 inches of display from the Formovie Cinema Edge. That's quite impressive and generally means that you can almost always have your projector as far away from where you are sitting as possible, which is great for preventing noise pollution. Not that the Formovie Cinema Edge generates a lot of that.

Another benefit of having the projector between you and the screen is that sound can come from a natural direction. As mentioned, the two 15W speakers on the Formovie Cinema Edge offer rich sound with practically no distortion, even at 100% loudness.

On the topic of image quality, we should probably start with brightness. The Formovie Cinema Edge is plenty bright at 2100 ISO lumens - it works excellently in a dimly lit room and really shines in complete darkness. It can even become uncomfortably bright in a light-controlled room.

During the day it's still usable, but you are better off sticking to very small (in relative terms at least) screen diagonals. If you plan on using it watching in well lit rooms you should probably invest in a projection screen.

The Formovie Cinema Edge has a few brightness settings. There are three separate brightness modes. These are "Office Mode", "Standard Mode," and "Night Mode," with decreasing levels of brightness. As one would expect, Night Mode generally gets you the best possible colors since these are not skewed to boost brightness and legibility.

The Formovie Cinema Edge has outstanding overall image quality. The colors are vivid, and the contrast is great. It can use some tuning, but it already impresses with its out-of-the-box settings. Black levels are some of the best in class. Since it is a single laser projector, you get the occasional blue tinting and rainbow effect on fast-moving objects, but it is minimal. The 4K native resolution noticeably boosts sharpness. Once warmed up to proper operating temperature and focused properly, the THEATER is truly impressively sharp when fed with high-res content. HDR performance is a true highlight with excellent tone mapping and contrast.

The Formovie Cinema Edge has a number of pre-set color profiles, and thankfully, there's also a Custom profile that lets you adjust individual parameters as you see fit.

The video options menu lets you adjust parameters per display mode and input basis, so you can dial things in as you like them. If you are like us and want to get the purest image experience possible with the least amount of post-processing and input latency, you will probably want to turn most of these options off. Especially things like noise reduction and MEMC.

The Formovie Cinema Edge offers pretty convenient focus and keystone correction menus. The latter can work with four or eight points (only adjusting the corners or also the sides).

Automatic focus and keystone are missing, though, which means you have to do it all manually and then readjust if you move the Cinema Edge.

The Formovie Cinema Edge can also be configured to project an upside-down image or do back-projection if your setup requires it.

We tried hooking up the Formovie Cinema Edge to a few different devices. A PC at 4K works really well, as there's plenty of resolution to read fine text. It works better if you don't have chroma subsampling, and you probably want to enable YCbCr color mode on the PC. You can quickly change image settings for the HDMI port from a convenient context menu on the projector remote.

We tried gaming as well. The Formovie Cinema Edge has a dedicated Game mode, and it does lower input latency to around 40ms, which is good enough for casual gaming. We tried a PC, a Nintendo Switch, and a Valve Steam Deck and they all worked solidly.

Optical resolution works differently than traditional monitors and is generally more forgiving to lower-resolution inputs. Lowering the resolution down to 1080p still resulted in a pretty sharp picture while relying solely on the upscaling of the projector itself. While we wouldn't necessarily recommend the Cinema Edge for gaming, this allows it to pull double duty.

Sound output from the onboard speaker system is pretty good overall, but nothing to phone home about. The audio is rich and clean, with clearly audible mids and crisp highs. Bass is lacking, though, so overall is probably a bit worse than a midrange soundbar.

There aren't nearly as many sound settings available as for video output. You can toggle Dolby Audio on and off, as well as adjust volume and sound virtualizer on the internal speaker setup.

There are also settings for audio desync, but those are most likely to be useful with an external speaker setup. The Formovie Cinema Edge has a 3.5mm jack for basic stereo output, TOSLINK (S/PDIF) and eARC support on one of its HDMI ports. There is no shortage of audio output options.

Software features

The Formovie Cinema Edge runs on Google TV, technically an evolution of Android TV. The two share the same core and seem to currently coexist in the software space, but they have some noteworthy differences in UI.

While at first glance, you might not necessarily be able to tell the two OS versions apart, Google TV arguably places more emphasis on content rather than apps. You get aggregated content from various sources and recommendations in one place and streamlined access to it all. Apps take more of a back seat in the overall experience. You can still find individual apps and operate them through their respective native interface, but that doesn't seem to be the primary way Google wants you to use the OS.

On the plus side, the entire UI of Google TV is very clean and straightforward. However, compared to Android TV, there seems to be fewer customization options. That being said, the Formovie Cinema Edge has full Google Play Services support, including the Google Play store. The latter is the Google TV version, featuring fewer apps, but ones tailored to the projector. You can find great options here to cover all the basics, like players, and file managers. There are even entire third-party launcher replacements that you can try out if you don't like the default look of Google TV.

Unless you plan on playing all your content back from a USB-attached storage device, the most important bit of information regarding the software experience on the Formovie Cinema Edge is how well it handles streaming services.

YouTube works great. The app came pre-installed on the projector and is more than happy to serve up 4K@60fps HDR content. It even triggers the appropriate HDR video mode on the projector, which is great to see.

Disney+ works just fine after installing from the Play Store. The same goes for HBO Max, Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. We are also happy to report that Netflix works great out of the box, which was not the case on the last Formovie THEATER projector we reviewed. We have no way of verifying what actual resolution any of these services is streaming in on the Formovie Cinema Edge, but output never looked soft.

If you want to get your hands a bit dirty and start a personal movie collection of your own, then our first suggestion would be Plex. It worked great on the Formovie Cinema Edge after fetching the app from the Play Store. We played some high-bitrate 4K HDR content with HDR and surround sound working flawlessly.

Video playback capabilities and performance

The Formovie Cinema Edge has the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing streaming services like Netflix to offer HD and greater resolutions.

The Formovie Cinema Edge has a MediaTek MT9629 chipset powering its Google TV smarts with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage. The chip has a total of four ARM Cortex-A55 CPU cores clocked at up to 1.5GHz and a Mali-G52 2EE MC1 GPU. You shouldn't bank on doing any gaming on the Formovie Cinema Edge unless it's through something like GeForce NOW, which is available on the Play Store and works flawlessly.

The MediaTek MT9629 does not impress in terms of raw power. In fact, it is not really a general-purpose ARM chipset like those you would find in a smartphone or tablet. Even MediaTek markets it as a "smart display SoC". However, it excells in terms of multimedia decoding and playback. The MediaTek MT9629 has an excellent hardware decoder, supporting AV1, AVS2, HEVC, VP9, H.264, SHVC 4K60@10bit for video decoding and BBC HLG, HDR10 (SMPTE2084), Dolby Vision HDR, Technicolor/Philips JHDR (ESTI TS 103 433), HDR10+ of the HDR standards. Plus, Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual X for audio. You can see a full list of supported codecs below.

The Formovie Cinema Edge basically chewed through every multimedia test file we threw at it with ease and zero stuttering. Even insanely high bitrate 4K content proved to be no challenge for the hardware decoder.

Final thoughts

We had a great time with the Formovie Cinema Edge. It will currently set you back around $2,500/€2,500 with an early bird price of $2,200/€2,200 until September September 10. That makes it pretty great value for a 4K laser UST projector.

It undercuts the Formovie THEATER significantly, that one costing around $3,500 and which we have reviewed as well. The THEATER is still the better projector out of the two with its triple laser ALPD setup. It also has an edge in audio output with a four-speaker array. However, neither advantage is colossal, making the Formovie Cinema Edge the arguably better deal. The fact is that unless you really know what to look for, you probably won't notice the slight image imperfections brought about by the single laser setup, nor will they bother you. As for the sound, we can only imagine that when you spend this much on a projector, you won't realistically be relying on its internal speakers. The more plastic build of the Cinema Edge is not a big deal either, and we personally like its Google TV better than Android TV. Brightness-wise, there is practically no difference between the two projectors either. Plus, we had zero issues with Netflix on the Cinema Edge, which was not the case on the THEATER.

If you are looking for a premium UST projector, the Formovie Cinema Edge should be on your shortlist. It will offer an excellent all-around experience in a light-controlled room. Just don't forget to get a decent-quality screen if you plan to use it in the daytime with ambient light around.

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