There are some things in life that are just great value for money. You make those purchases with your head. Then, there are also some things in life that aren’t great value, but are just so desirable that you’re willing to pay the premium. You make those purchases with your heart.
Then, there’s the Samsung The Freestyle. It’s a RM4,999 portable projector that doesn’t get really bright, doesn’t sound particularly good, and did I mention it costs RM4,999?
Now, I will admit that I’m no home projector enthusiast. I’ve always been under the impression that too many things have to align for you to get a good experience on a projector. And I have neither the knowledge nor the patience to get into this—especially when the alternatives (y’know, TVs, monitors, etc.) perform so well with practically no setup time.
But the Samsung The Freestyle takes this to a whole new level of nope. You may have seen my unboxing of the device last month where I was already quite unimpressed with it. Now, more than a month later, I have to report that things have amazingly…only gotten worse.
Let’s start with what I initially liked about it
Two main things stood out positively to me during my unboxing and hands-on. The first was the build and design of The Freestyle. As something that’s marketed as being a portable projector you could bring everywhere, I think it absolutely nails the aesthetic and size. It’s a clean, cylindrical, mostly featureless device that would feel right at home in either a Pixar film or a dystopian sci-fi universe where the robots have taken over—and I kinda like that.
I also really liked the fit and finish on the product. The soft touch material surrounding the main body felt good, even if I was a little worried about the white colourway staying white over time. The good news? The white finish is holding up quite well so far. The bad news? It appears that the material is warping and coming apart.
You can see a noticeable swelling especially around the I/O ports where the adhesive has just given up—something I definitely didn’t expect to find on a product from Samsung. Especially one that costs RM4,999. Now, it is designed to come off easily since one of the selling points for this device are the “customisable skins”. But if that was the case, why is it being held down by adhesive?
There’s no mention of any adhesive on the Samsung website’s guide—and I’m pretty sure even if it was designed to be user replaceable, it shouldn’t bulge up the way it does on our device. Also, I tried following their instructions to remove the skin but after about 30 minutes of struggling, I couldn’t get it to budge more than a centimeter.
The second thing I liked about it was the built-in Tizen OS. To me, it was the most valuable feature because it was what made the Freestyle more than just a projector. And the good news is that for the most part I still like it a lot.
I’ve always been a fan of Samsung’s TV operating systems, and I use it frequently on my Samsung Smart Monitor, and the experience is nearly identical on the Freestyle. The only noticeable difference is the slightly different remote as well as the occasional lag spikes when interfacing with the Freestyle.
Does it get annoying and make it feel like I was watching stuff on my RM200 Mi Box? Yes. Is it a deal breaker that I would rather live without? No. Definitely not, because if we’re talking about deal breakers, The Freestyle gets something far more important wrong.
It’s still not bright enough
Samsung states that The Freestyle is capable of projecting at a brightness of 550 Lumens, which to me as someone who typically reviews smartphones, didn’t sound particularly impressive. What I found out later was that simply stating 550 Lumens was actually too ambiguous.
According to YouTuber The Hook Up, there are actually multiple different standards to measuring brightness in Lumens, and the one you should be looking for is ANSI Lumens. Now, I don’t have the tools to test or confirm how bright The Freestyle’s projection is in ANSI Lumens, but according to The Hook Up’s testing, it was able to achieve about 240 ANSI Lumens which according to my research is not even within the recommended brightness range for indoor projection with the lights off.
That would explain why my experience with The Freestyle was so abysmal from a viewing standpoint. Even in my bedroom with all the lights turned off, the projection still felt a little too dim for my liking. You really have to turn everything off and draw every blackout curtain before you’d get what I consider an acceptable viewing experience, and that does not seem to line up with it being advertised as “ready for your next adventure”.
The only real feature that I’d say is even remotely close to being “adventure ready” is the built-in speaker—and even then my reason for that is that it gets louder than a smartphone’s speakers. They don’t sound particularly good, lacking any kind of meaningful bass. But if you choose the right audio setting, you can hear stuff like vocals clearly. It reminds me the most of something like a Google Home Mini or an Amazon Echo Dot, which functionally is usually good enough for the outdoors.
But the thing about the Freestyle is that it’s supposed to be a projector. And when it comes to that, it has to at least have an acceptable level of projection quality, especially when you want to charge nearly RM5,000. It doesn’t matter if it has Tizen, or if it has a decent speaker, or if it looks like a Pixar character. It just doesn’t get bright enough to be remotely usable in practical situations.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the whole “using the projector as a mood light with the cap on” nonsense. The most important thing someone would want to maintain on a projector is the lifespan of its bulb. So why would any self-respecting person want to waste a single minute of the 20,000 hour quoted lifespan of the Freestyle using it as mood lighting? Just pick up a sunset lamp or something if you want a mood.
Not even if it was free
It has been a while since I’ve used something with so few redeeming qualities, priced this exorbitantly, from Samsung. Even if something was made with cheap materials, looked ugly or had a higher-than-market price tag, if it did what it was supposed to do well I wouldn’t even be that mad.
Though I guess with the Freestyle, I’m not mad either…I’m just disappointed. When I first saw the teaser images and the concept—like being able to connect it to a lamp or attach a battery pack—I was actually stoked. It genuinely looked like a cool product.
But if it doesn’t even do the one thing it’s supposed to do properly, then looking like a cool product is about as far as it gets. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the Auto Keystone and Auto Focus modes on our unit occasionally go out of whack, forcing me to manually tweak those settings.
Y’know, maybe I was wrong. Maybe Samsung was right in advertising using this product as a mood light with the cap on, because after spending some time with it, it sure seems like that’s all it’s good for. An RM4,999 mood lamp.