Philips GamePix 900 Gaming Projector Review – I’d actually Buy This!

This little black box – which at least at the early adopter price tag currently available – only costs the same as a decent gaming monitor, and yet offers either 4K 60 or 1080p 240Hz output, low input lag, and of course up to 120 inches of display size, well it seems too good to be true right? Happily, it isn’t, and it’s actually a decent choice that I’d consider buying for myself (if I wanted a projector, anyway)! Let me show you around this thing to explain why. 

Unlike a few of the other projectors I’ve checked out recently, this thing doesn’t cost a million pounds, and is a lot more barebones. The BenQ X500i is actually a great comparison here, because it is basically the same projector under the hood, but doesn’t include any form of onboard OS. The BenQ projector includes a Google TV dongle, alongside its two other HDMI and one USB C DisplayPort inputs, which makes this quite the full service machine. This can be completely standalone, or of course you can hook up some inputs and use it that way, but this is kind of a smart TV – whereas the GamePix is more of a dumb TV. There is no standalone OS on here, there is only one HDMI input, and that’s it. But, that’s not such a bad thing. Philips are marketing this thing as a ‘gaming projector’, and for that purpose the IO makes a lot more sense. Seriously, all you get is one HDMI port, a USB A port, audio out, DC in and that’s it. 

You’ve got a sort of zoom and focus situation going on at the top, although I’ll be honest and say there isn’t much room here. It’s maybe a couple inches of usable zoom and that’s it – and actually the one feature this appears to be missing is being ‘short throw’. It can focus at reasonably small distances, but the display size is really pretty tiny. You need a lot of room to get this to that 120 inch maximum screen size, and of course the 1000 ANSI lumens figure is 1000 lumens regardless of screen size, so the smaller the display image, the brighter it’ll be – compare that to the X500i’s 2200 ANSI lumens and it seems positively dark ages! But, set up a little over a metre away from my wall this this is more than bright enough, especially in a dark room. This does need, or at least highly prefer, a dark environment for the best experience, an issue you don’t have with LCD or OLED panels. 

One of the main claims Philips makes about this thing is a 6 millisecond input latency – luckily I build tools that can test that, and at least in the default out-of-the-box mode, you’re looking at more like 10 milliseconds, which while not terrible even for gaming, isn’t quite what they promised and is a far cry from a 240Hz LCD display which would be more like 2 milliseconds in the same test. Happily though Philips provided us with a game mode which helps drop that latency figure down to just 5 milliseconds – one better than their quoted result no less. There is a catch to that game mode though, if you need to use keystone adjustments or digital zoom – both of which cut into the usable display resolution so should generally be avoided where possible for the best experience anyway – game mode disables them, so it’s either a nice looking image OR low latency. That is the same for the BenQ and Acer options I’ve tested though, so it’s more a limitation of current DLP projectors than it is a Philips specific issue. And actually, these results are functionally identical to the X500i, perhaps that one is a touch faster at closer to 4 milliseconds actually, but in practice it’s about the same, another suggestion that these are pretty similar bits of kit underneath. 

The thing about DLP projectors – and why I can’t give you any colour or brightness measurements – is that to display colour images from a single micro-mirror array, there’s actually three different LEDs in here displaying the red parts of the image, then green, then blue. That means this isn’t one continuous image, but three sets of images flashing per frame. At 240Hz it cycles red, green then blue once in the 4.2 millisecond frame time, and there is a bit of dead time where the output is fully black too. Compared to LCDs and OLEDs which show you the full colour frame, all at once, for the whole frame time (or as close as they can get to it anyway), this can be potentially headache inducing to those sensitive to flickering (like me). Just something to note.

With that said, the option to either run this at 4K60 for content consumption – movies, TV, or your favourite tech reviewer all look great on this thing – or swap to 1080p 240Hz for smooth and responsive gaming is really nice. That’s a feature a number of gaming projectors offer so it isn’t exactly unique, but it’s nice to have anyway. It means that gaming is smooth and responsive – great for first person shooters where ‘frames win games’ and low input lag means you can shoot first, and for more visually impressive titles like racing games where the immersion of being enveloped by your car’s cockpit make it an amazing experience. Shame I’m not able to control a Ferrari F1 car around the nordschleife all that well! But it’s great to look at at least… 

So if this thing is a decent experience, but a little barebones, why was I so interested by it at the start of this video? Well, mostly thanks to the price tag. The first 1000 units, if you pre-order now anyway, are listed at just £495. For a DLP LED projector, that is frankly insane – that BenQ X500i I’ve been comparing this thing to is a whopping £1,500! Admittedly it’s a slightly higher end unit with 4 LEDs instead of 3, more brightness, short throw and has that Google TV stick, but still. There is a couple of catches to that £500 price tag though. That’s without VAT, which adds another £99 to that price tag, and should you miss the pre-order window the price shoots up to an insane £819 exVAT, making this a £1000 projector. Considering the BenQ goes on sale for more like £1,200, £1000 is a little too high for an otherwise barebones DLP projector for me – and no adaptive sync either. That is rare to find, but it is available on some like the Acer one I reviewed recently. At £600, and assuming this suits your needs, this thing seems like an incredible bargain for what would otherwise cost upwards of £1000. At £1000 you might as well get the BenQ X300G which has the same sort of features, but comes with that Google TV stick too making it a multimedia machine as well as a gaming display. So there you have it, at the discounted price it’s a great deal, at MSRP, maybe not.