The Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector isn’t a fancy projector – but it’s certainly cheap.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| It’s cheap. That’s kind of the point. | Mediocre visual output |
| Supports HDMI and Composite Input | Integrated speakers are poor, and there’s no inbuilt Bluetooth |
| Includes a carry case | Build quality is… exactly what you’d expect at this price! |
Score: 2/5
In this review
Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector Specifications
Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector Design
Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector Performance
Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector Conclusion
Ethical disclaimer: The Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector used in this review was purchased by me for the purposes of review – which leaves the ethical position in exactly the same space it would have been had it been loaned to me or sent to me for review.
I review everything with the same lens around value and honest, ethical principles. It’s just how I am. For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Before I start in, I should set the scene for this review. ALDI, the German supermarket giant, sure does sell a lot of electronics, from wireless chargers to TVs, very intermittently (it’s been a while) full laptops or desktops, all under its “Special Buys” umbrella term for the middle aisles of most of its stores.
While it does offer up some brand-name products from time to time, the vast majority of what it sells is provided under its in-house brand, Bauhn.
ALDI Special Buys are transitory – though as a relative of mine is very fond of pointing out, some of them repeat a LOT – and this means that there’s not typically a way to assess them independently… unless you buy them.
Also read:
ALDI special buys vinyl records Father’s Day 2025: Repeated radio bootleg trash (AngusKidman.Show)
I tend to hit my local ALDI most weekends – it’s an aside, but I have absolutely zero supermarket loyalty, because why would you? – and a couple of weeks back, zipping past those middle aisles, the $119 Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector caught my eye.
I’ve been reviewing tech for a long time, and I can well recall when a 1080p projector would have commanded a price easily 10x that or more. Of course, technology has progressed since then, and there are countless odd little cheap projectors on the like of Amazon, eBay et al… but my curiousity was piqued, and I decided to take one for the team, picking it up to put it through its paces.
By now, the odds of you finding one in your local ALDI feel slim… but then, the odds of them being offered again in six months feels pretty high.
Also read:
Nebula Capsule Air Projector Review
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Design
The Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector certainly isn’t fancy looking, and you’re not getting anything that appears terribly well built. Its white plastic casing has a degree of flex to it, there’s no lens cap at all and the buttons are small and rather clicky.
It feels cheap of course, because it is; these are often the tradeoffs you’re going to have to put up with when you’re only spending $119 on a projector. None of this surprised me at all, because it was very much part of the deal.
Which is not to say that there aren’t some surprising aspects to the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector’s design. It’s got a surprising number of connection ports, for a start, with USB, HDMI and an AV jack with an included component cable input in the box, allowing for connection for some properly old-school audio visual inputs.
More ports than expected (including one that makes my inner retro gamer happy)
As a committed retro gamer, I have to approve of that kind of approach, even though my more realistic brain points out that roughly 99.999% of the audience is just going to use the HDMI input anyway. There’s an included short HDMI cable, lens cleaning cloth and figure 8 style power cable in the packaging as well.
I was also pleased to discover a standard tripod screw at the base of the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector, making it suitable for quick mounting just about anywhere you could place a tripod. A nice touch that you don’t always see in cheaper projectors, and one that I very much wasn’t expecting.
Bauhn/ALDI also obviously expect you to think of this projector as portable, which at 950g it mostly is, because they include a simple carrying case in the box as well.
Simple is the word here, with very thin padding and elastic straps that are already starting to fray away from the interior of the case. If you’re thinking that this is the protective case to take on your next camping trip (where power is available), think again.
Performance
The specifications for the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector naturally enough trade on that Full HD/1080p specification, but there’s more to getting an actually good image projected than just the supported resolutions. The biggest catch in the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector’s specs is the brightness; at just 180 lumens this isn’t a particularly bright projector by the standards of such things.
Sure, if you stare straight into the bulb (don’t do this, by the way) it will hurt, but the effect of having such a relatively low-level bulb brightness is that images presented on its screen are on the more pale side than you’d get out of a higher-grade projector. Again, you’re buying a cheap projector, don’t expect the best here because you won’t get it. Colours are on the more muted side for most presented material, and you’ll likely have to fiddle with the somewhat clunky focus wheel on the front of the projector to get even vaguely passable images out of it.
The supplied remote control is simple enough, as are the menu structures that let you set very simple predefined colour temperatures, framing (4:3, 16:9 or zoom levels that range from 100% down to 75% of the provided frame). You can also adjust the output of the integrated 3W speaker, though there’s not much point in switching it from its standard mode through Movie, Sports or User-Defined, because they’re all limited by the fact that the integrated speaker is really quite awful.
While the images that the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector puts out aren’t anything special, they’re appropriate to the price. What isn’t is the speaker that provides its audio output.
The speaker on this thing sounds like it’s being filtered through a wet sock, not helped I’m sure by the cheap plastic enclosure of the projector adding a lot of reverberation.
For the purposes of (for example) watching simple TV or maybe sports it’s just about clear enough to make out what’s being said, but it distorts a lot and isn’t overly pleasant to listen to for any serious length of time.
It would have been nice if Bluetooth connectivity was included, but all you get is a headphone jack. I’ve tested the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector out with a cheap Bluetooth retransmitter, and that does work, so there are ways around this problem, albeit ones that will cost you just a little bit more to fix.
The HDMI input is likely to be the primary way most people will use the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector, but it does also support file playback from microSD card or a connected USB drive. It’s very hit-and-miss (and mostly miss) as to whether both the video and audio codecs of your files will actually run on its inbuilt playback engine, however.
The Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector also supports firmware updates, though at the time of writing the only thing you could download from Bauhn is a PDF of the included manual. It’s certain that this is a rebadged white label projector from… somewhere, let’s call it “China”, for the sake of simplicity, and also because that’s where the product manual tells me it was built.
ALDI does not have its own electronics factories to speak of so it’s definitely been made by someone else for them, though the only identifiers present in the onscreen menus declare it to be the ADHDP-0825 model using hardware version WS-TE3000.23169. Quick lazy searching on those terms finds, variously, an electric jackhammer and a research paper on dynamics and control of aerospace systems.
It’s probably not either of those retooled as a cheap projector, right?
Ultimately though, this doesn’t give me anything to go on for finding the real manufacturer or whether there might be actual firmware updates available for this projector at any point in the future. I’m going to go optimistic here and say… no.
Pessimistic Alex would also have said no, for what that’s worth, but I would have prefixed it with some kind of expletive.
The bulb in the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector is rated as suitable for up to 30,000 hours of playback time.
There’s no obvious method for replacement listed in the manual – though it does encourage you to responsibly recycle it when its service life ends – and I’m going to take the not-too-crazy guess that while very determined folks might work out a way to open it up and force solder a new bulb in place, most of the buyers picking up a projector along with their milk and spuds probably wouldn’t bother.
Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector: Alex’s Verdict
The Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector is cheap, and that’s very much the point.
It’s far from alone in the cheap projector space; a quick bit of lazy Amazon searching can find projectors at this price and indeed much cheaper. A hell of a lot cheaper, in fact.
I mean, here’s a 1080p (claimed) projector for just over $11 at the time of writing, though I’m not quite tempted enough to order it.
Yet.
If somebody wants to drop some money in the Ko-Fi tin, though, I’ll have a go at it. Use the button below and leave me a note stating “I want to see Alex suffer reviewing the cheapest projector possible”, and I’ll get right onto it.
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The real point here is that there’s plenty of very cheap, likely very ordinary projectors that you can get, and in one sense at $119 the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector is actually overpriced.
If you just want very basic projection for sports fixtures, simple presentations or gaming efforts where you’re not so fussed about having crisp 4K visuals, then you totally can do so.
The one advantage I suppose is that because it’s sold locally by ALDI, it would probably be easier to get repairs and/or refunds as and when something goes wrong, something that can be harder to sort out from absolute no-name brands, even if they might be sourcing the exact same parts from the exact same factories.
That being said, I’ll get my value out of the Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector, simply enough just as a larger-than-usual retro games screen as and when the need arises. I’ll definitely be hooking up an external speaker, however, when I do.
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Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector:
Pricing and availability
The Bauhn 1080p Home Theatre Full HD Projector retails in Australia for $119.
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