Philips GamePix 800 Smart Gaming Projector Review

Philips launched their GamePix earlier this year with their GamePix 900 – a projector I reviewed back in March – and now they’re back at it again with this, the GamePix 800. It’s a little less cash, but is arguably more feature-packed, so let’s take a look at this thing and see if it’s worth your hard earned money! Let’s start with a brief look around, starting with the front. Here you’ve got a vent, the lens assembly – with a square cutout. Honestly this looks like a cover you’re meant to remove but I promise you’re not. You’ve also got an IR receiver in the front, which is important as this isn’t a short-throw projector. This needs to be pretty far from your wall to generate a decently sized image. I had it around 1.8 metres from my wall and that offered a 55 inch image. Continuing our tour, the left hand side is where you’ll find the built in speaker and more vents, the back has two HDMI ports, on USB port, an RS 232 serial port, audio out, AC in, and this suspicious little bulge in the cover, which if I pop that off reveals… A Google TV stick! There’s a third HDMI port back here, along with a right angle microUSB cable, and together they let the specially designed dongle work. This is a big improvement over the GamePix 900 which was “dumb” by comparison. Anyway, looking at the top you’ve got quite the assortment of buttons, should you not want to use the included remote, and of course the zoom and focus dials. These don’t have much in the way of adjustment, as in there isn’t that much zoom, so placement is incredibly important here. Finally on the bottom you have a coarse-thread height adjust foot, which also doesn’t have much adjustment room, and some threaded inserts for a ceiling mount. Annoyingly there isn’t a G1/4 thread here, so you will need a proper mount rather than a tripod. 

I should also mention the remote, that’s a much nicer, more Roku styled and feel than the 900’s remote, I suppose because thanks to the GoogleTV dongle built in you’ll be interacting with this more often. This has the usual projector controls, along with a voice assistant button, and the dreaded hard-coded buttons at the bottom, at least for semi-useful options like Youtube, Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube Music. It’d be great if you could remap these, but anyway. It’s a nice feeling remote, and does work from the front or back of the projector too. 

Since I’ve mentioned it a few times now, let’s talk about the GoogleTV dongle. This is an excellent addition, turning this into a proper multimedia box, rather than a “dumb” display. The fact it’s an external dongle means it’s upgradable and replaceable, at least in theory anyway, which is great, although I’d mention that compared to my Chromecast Google TV dongle I use on my TV, this is noticeably slower to respond, slower to load content, and just generally more laggy. It’s perfectly usable, doesn’t lag when playing content or anything, but the actual user experience isn’t amazing.

As for the visuals, well that’s where it gets interesting. This thing is listed as only supporting 1080p (at up to 120Hz for gaming anyway), but when you use the GoogleTV dongle, the projector reports running at 4K60! It’s hard to say for sure if the projector is actually running at 4K, but to the eye at least it does look like it. Text is sharp and crisp and doesn’t have a lot of aliasing that you’d expect from 1080p at this size. I mean you can make out more of my horrible wallpaper texture than you can the pixels. That’s impressive. I did notice, almost immediately, though that the colours looked a little off, but I think that’s a least in large part thanks to my cream coloured wall being the backdrop. If I had a proper screen I’d expect it being a better experience. What I would say though is that this 2500 ANSI lumens is better than the 900’s 1000. Even with the curtains open it’s passable, and in the dark it’s a pretty vibrant experience. There’s still an obvious lack of contrast, but it’s great for a projector anyway. 

For gaming, well Philips claims an 8 millisecond input lag time, which I’m happy to report is actually underselling itself. My open source response time tool – available at OSRTT.com by the way – reported just 4 milliseconds on average, which actually bests the GamePix 900’s 5.1 millisecond result, and ties BenQ’s X500i. What that means for gaming is that it’s pretty smooth, pretty responsive, and really quite immersive. I started off by playing Siege to see how an FPS game felt – I mean the Texas Instruments DLP chip gives effectively instant response times so it’s no surprise it’s pretty decent – and I’m happy to report that it’s a great time. It’s a little hard to see enemies with the distinct lack of contrast, and putting your display pretty far away means it’s a bit of a squint-fest, but on the whole it’s decent. Then I swapped to Dirt Rally 2.0 and… my god. This is what this game was made for. I couldn’t stop playing, it was addictive being that immersed, that engrossed. It didn’t matter that the speaker sounded awfully tinny and compressed, or the lack of a tripod mount meant I had to prop it up with an AOC monitor box, or that it wasn’t keyed correctly because using keystone corrections hurts latency noticeably, all that mattered was the next turn. I totally get why you’d want a gaming projector now. Like I logically knew why, but this gave me the emotional reason too. God this is good.

The other bit of good news is that this isn’t £1000 or more like most of this style of projector, it’s £800. That’s still an awful lot of money for a 1080p 120Hz display, even if it is one you can pump up to 100 inches with enough space – although bare in mind the larger the display size the less light you have on any given part, so a smaller 50-70 inch output is probably the sweet spot for this thing – but it really is hard to argue the immersiveness isn’t fantastic. The fact it can also double as your living room TV with a built in Google TV stick is pretty sweet too, and I’m happy to report it’s decently quiet too – it’s not silent but it isn’t hideously loud like some – so that isn’t an issue. This is really cool, and if you’ve got the space, this might be for you. I was going to say that if you’ve got £800 to spend on a projector, you might want to opt for a 240Hz/4K60 version like the X300G or X500i instead, but apparently they are still both £1,400, so I think that rules that out! The GamePix 900 does offer the higher resolution, but doesn’t offer built in GoogleTV, and only offers 1000 lumens, so genuinely I think this 800 is the better choice on balance. Good job Philips.