The Vankyo Leisure 530W is the latest in the Vankyo Leisure projector series aimed at both the small-medium office, and the home theatre user. Compact and portable, it will support 4K video, is Wi-Fi enabled and comes with a projection screen in the box
Inside the box there is the 530W projector, a remote control (you need to supply two AAA batteries) and a power cable. There is also a short HDMI cable, an audio cable, and a user manual.
Additionally there is a synthetic screen cloth and stick-on hooks. Position the screen on the wall and stretch the fabric out using the hooks. Alternatively, if you have a pale coloured wall, just project the image directly onto the wall. The screen would be useful if you had a dark coloured, or patterned wall.
The projector itself is 1920 x 1080px resolution with 10,000:1 contrast, and upgraded brightness. The 530W delivers 310 ANSI Lumens which gives a reasonable image in moderately dark rooms.
You can mount the projector in front of or behind the screen, stand it on a horizontal surface, or mount it to the ceiling using a ceiling mount that fixes to the four screw holes in the bottom of the projector.
The rear of the projector has the socket for the power lead, and the speaker grille. There is a manual keystone and focus knob on one side — along with an air inlet.
The other side of the unit contains the fan exhaust, and slots for USB, two x HDMI, AV-in, and audio-out. There is also a TF card slot.
There is a touch screen panel on top of the 530W to access the menu and a set of controls to play, pause, change the input source, and move through the menu controls.
Keystone correction can be manually or automatically adjusted up to an offset of around 50 degrees — useful if you place the projector in different places each time.
I found that manually tweaking the keystone worked best when the projector was slightly off-centre. It is best to use the remote control to do this.
The 530W connects using either 2.4G or 5G and has a range of input options including HDMI, AV, TF card, or USB. You can also use screen mirroring (casting) from your Android or iOS device over Wi-Fi. Connection to my Android device was quick and easy and worked well.
On-board sound is really good from its 3W speaker and there is little distortion across the ranges. Use the remote control to zoom the screen to around 50% of its display size to get the image size you want.
According to the user manual, you can get up to a 200 inch display if the projector is 20 feet away.
In reality, any text on the screen is blurred if the screen is more than 10 feet away from the projector — even when the focus ring is turned round to the maximum setting. Even video is blurred at 20 feet, so the user manual should be updated to reflect this.
I was a little disappointed in the screen brightness in daylight. Other Vankyo projectors like the Leisure 520W, and Leisure 510W seemed to be significantly brighter than the 530W — and the V600 brighter still. However, for home theatre, and dark meeting rooms the image is good.
All in all at under $230, the Vankyo Leisure 530W is a nice compact projector with good sound, Wi-Fi screen mirroring and a reasonable image.
Make sure your screen size is under 100 inches to avoid blurriness, and tweak the keystone and focus manually and you will get a good experience for your small office or home theatre set up.
