Roku Aurzen Eazze D1R Projector Review: Big-Screen Fun

Projectors have always been a bit of a hassle. If you want a big screen for a film night at home, you normally have to measure the distance to the wall, fiddle with the focus, battle through some clunky menu, and hope the device has the streaming apps you’re interested in.

The Aurzen EAZZE D1R wants to do away with all that. It’s a small, light projector with Roku built right in – so you get the same simple interface, and the same thousands of apps, you’d get from a Roku streaming stick, straight onto your wall.

It focuses itself, straightens the picture itself, and a couple of minutes after opening the box you can be watching something.

And it’s a fun little device. It’s not perfect, as you’ll see in this review – the brightness is only average, so you really do need a dark room, and the full price is a bit high for what you get. But it’s easy to use, it looks great in the dark, and if you grab it on one of its frequent discounts, it makes a lot of sense.

Who Is The Aurzen Roku Smart Projector For?

I didn’t expect to reach for the word “fun” when writing up a projector, but that’s the word that kept coming to mind with this one – and it tells you most of what you need to know about who it’s for.

There’s a whole world of projectors aimed at enthusiasts. The sort where you pore over placement guides, measure the throw distance to the centimetre, weigh up native contrast and lumens, and budget for a proper ambient-light-rejecting screen to do the picture justice.

It’s a rewarding hobby if you’re into it, but it is a hobby – one that takes money, space and patience.

The Aurzen EAZZE D1R is very much not that.

This is a set-it-and-forget-it projector. You pull it out when you fancy a film night, prop it on a table or a shelf (or even on your bed), turn off the lights, switch it on, and a few seconds later there’s a big screen on your wall.

No measuring, no calibration, no fuss. When your mates come round for the footie, it’s out of the cupboard and running before the pre-match build-up has finished.

That ease is the whole point, and it is both the strength and the limit. Don’t buy this expecting a reference home-cinema experience, because that isn’t what it is for and it won’t pretend otherwise. Do buy it if you want a proper big picture, at a modest price, without having to faff with settings.

Roku’s interface fits that brief like a glove. It’s the same clean, simple grid you’ll know from the streaming sticks, with all the apps already there, so there’s nothing to learn and nothing to wrestle with.

The hardware gets you a big screen in seconds, and the software makes sure that once you’re there, starting something is just as quick.

Setting Up and Using the Aurzen Roku Smart Projector

There honestly isn’t much to say about setting up, because there’s so little to it. From lifting it out of the box to having everything up and running took me about five minutes.

In the box you get the projector itself, the remote (note that the batteries for it are not included), a power cable, and a small cleaning kit.

That five-minute setup was with an existing Roku account, which is the quick path – Roku’s easy interface guides you every step of the way, you sign in, and the projector pulls down all the apps you already had on your other Roku devices.

If you’re completely new to Roku, add a couple of minutes to create an account on your phone or laptop first, then sign in.

That account, by the way, isn’t optional. You have to have a Roku account to use the projector – it isn’t something you can skip past. The good news is it’s free, so it’s a minor step rather than a real hurdle.

Once you’re signed in, you get a handful of recommended apps installed for you, a few more you can pick from, and that’s it. You’re ready to start watching.

The other thing that makes setup so painless is the automatic focus and keystone correction. Auto-focus is self-explanatory – point the projector at the wall and it sharpens the image for you, no fiddling with a focus wheel.

Auto-keystone is the one worth explaining: keystoning is the distortion you get when a projector isn’t perfectly square to the wall, so the picture comes out as a wonky trapezoid rather than a clean rectangle.

Auto-keystone fixes that automatically, squaring the image off so it looks right even when the projector is sitting at an angle or off to one side.

It works well, too. When you move the projector, it briefly switches to a tuning screen with a graphical guide and sorts out the framing itself. At one point my wall “broke” into a door, and it was smart enough to end the usable image right at the edge of the door rather than spilling the picture across it.

There’s also a manual orientation setting with four options, which adds a bit of placement flexibility on top of the automatic correction.

You can choose Front – tabletop (the standard setup, sat on a table or shelf in front of the wall), Front – ceiling (which flips the image for when it’s mounted upside down on a ceiling mount), Rear – tabletop or Rear – ceiling (both for rear projection, where you’re projecting from behind a translucent screen).

Most people will stick with the default front-tabletop, but the options are there if your room calls for something less conventional, and combined with the tripod thread on the bottom it gives you a fair bit of freedom over where the projector lives.

Using The Aurzen Roku Smart Projector

Overall, I’ve had a good experience with it. Startup is very quick – much quicker than older projectors that make you wait for a lamp to warm up – and once you’re in, videos load smoothly across YouTube, Netflix and the other apps.

The fan is worth a mention, since you’re often sitting fairly close to a projector in a quiet room. It’s audible but surprisingly quiet, and you forget it’s there pretty quickly. It doesn’t get warm either, at least not in any way that’s too hot to handle.

It’s not the snappiest device, mind you. Apps take a bit longer to load than I’m used to, probably down to a somewhat underpowered processor or a memory limit. It’s not a deal-breaker – once an app is up and running it’s a smooth ride – but you do notice the wait when you first open something.

One thing to be clear about: there’s no tuner inside, so there’s no Freeview and no live TV guide. Live TV instead comes through the streaming apps themselves – the live portions of BBC iPlayer, ITVX and the rest. It does the job, but if you’re expecting a proper channel list like on a Freeview telly, that’s not how this works (though you could use the HDMI port to connect a Freely box like the Manhattan Aero).

The Roku Interface

If you’ve never used a Roku device, the interface is about as simple as streaming TV software gets.

The home screen is a clean grid of app tiles – or “channels”, in Roku’s wording – and you just move across them and pick what you want – Netflix, HBO Max, BBC iPlayer, etc. There’s a search function and a settings menu, and that’s more or less it. Nothing to learn, nothing buried.

That simplicity is a big part of why the projector is so easy to live with, and it’s the same interface you’ll find on Roku’s streaming sticks.

The one thing worth knowing is that there are no separate user profiles, so anything personalised – recommendations, your list of saved shows – is shared across the whole household rather than split per person.

It’s also worth a quick note that Roku has redesigned this home screen in the US, swapping the simple grid for rows of recommendations.

That overhaul hasn’t reached the UK yet, so for now the projector runs the familiar, straightforward layout – and even when the new look does arrive, there’s a setting to switch back to the classic grid.

Picture Quality

The picture is quite decent. It’s 1080p rather than 4K, so it’s not razor-sharp, but for a projector at this price it looks good – with one big condition attached, which is how dark your room is.

I only tested it on plain walls, and I’d argue that’s the honest way to test it. Someone buying a projector at this price isn’t going to spend out on a professional screen that can cost more than the projector itself. On a normal wall, in a properly dark room, the results are genuinely pleasing, and the black levels are decent for this sort of money.

The catch is the brightness. At 280 ANSI lumens, this is an after-dark device, full stop. Keep the room dark and it looks great. Let even a little light in – a gap in the curtains, a lamp in the corner – and the image washes out quickly.

Pushing towards the maximum 150-inch image spreads that brightness even thinner, so in practice the sweet spot sits some way short of the largest size.

Sound Quality

The built-in speakers are a pair of 5W units, and they can get surprisingly loud. They’re usable, and fine for casual watching, but the sound quality is only slightly better than a phone speaker – so for anything where audio matters, you’ll want to send the sound elsewhere.

The obvious route would be Bluetooth, except that’s where I hit a real snag. Bluetooth audio had a noticeable delay, enough to throw the lip-sync out, and that makes it almost unusable – whether you’re trying to connect headphones or a speaker. It’s the one genuine frustration in day-to-day use.

So the better options are wired or app-based. The Roku app on your phone has a private listening mode that lets you pipe the sound to headphones plugged into your phone, which works very well and is handy for late-night watching.

Failing that, you can connect speakers via the 3.5mm port, or run a soundbar through the HDMI port – that HDMI socket supports ARC, which is really where it earns its place, since it lets you push audio out to a soundbar or amp for a proper upgrade over those little built-in speakers.

The Remote

The remote is the standard Roku one, which is comfortable to hold and easy to navigate – no complaints about the layout. But two things let it down on a device like this.

First, the buttons aren’t backlit. On a projector that only really works in a dark room, illuminated buttons would have made a real difference. I happen to know the Roku remote off by heart, but not everyone reviews Roku devices for a living, and hunting for the right button in the dark gets old.

Second, there’s no voice search button on the remote itself. If you want to search by voice, you can only do it through the Roku app on your phone. It feels like a corner cut to save a bit of money by shipping the non-voice remote, and it’s a minus worth knowing about before you buy.

Bottom Line: Is The Aurzen Roku Smart Projector Worth It?

It mostly comes down to price. The official retail price is £199.99, and at that figure it’s a harder sell – the specs, the brightness in particular, don’t quite justify it against rival projectors at the same money.

The saving grace is that it has barely sold at full price. It’s been on offer almost constantly since launch, and even as I write this, it’s £129.99 with a voucher on Amazon. At that kind of price, the maths changes completely, and it turns into a real bargain – as long as you go in knowing exactly what it is and what it isn’t.

The single biggest thing to be honest with yourself about is light. You can’t have a garden footie party with this. British summer evenings stay light until late, and this projector needs proper darkness to work – that isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the whole ballgame. If that rules out your use case, this isn’t the projector for you.

But if you’re happy to watch in a dark room, and what you want is a lightweight projector you can pull out whenever the mood takes you, it’s close to perfect for that.

It’s so light and so easy to set up that you can genuinely move it around – a film in the living room, hand it over to the kids in the afternoon, then carry it through to the bedroom for a late-night watch.

Give it a big enough white wall – or a screen if you’d rather – and a way to block out the light, and this becomes one of the easiest projectors to live with that I’ve used.

Roku’s simple interface is the perfect match for that easygoing, set-it-and-forget-it approach. Just catch it on offer, go in clear-eyed about the limitations, and there’s a lot of fun to be had here.

Note: The projector was supplied by the manufacturer for this review. As always, this did not influence my unbiased opinion of the product.