Two projectors sitting inside the top 30 of Amazon’s video projector chart this week are separated by $46.95, and almost nothing else about them lines up. The Aurzen EAZZE D1R Cube sells for $249.99 and puts a full Roku TV inside the chassis. The ONOAYO ONO5Pro 2.0 sells for $296.94 and puts two 60-watt speakers inside it. Both are single-panel LCD, both claim 1080p native, and both are running 4.4-star averages. The money goes to completely different places.
Aurzen’s pitch is that the D1R Cube is a Roku TV, not a projector with an app store bolted on. In practice that means the home screen, the search, the account and the remote are the same ones a Roku owner already has in the living room, and the streaming apps are licensed rather than sideloaded — Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, YouTube and Apple TV all arrive as first-party channels.
Buyers keep circling back to the same detail in their reviews: the thing they liked was not a feature, it was the absence of one. Several describe finally not needing a streaming stick hanging off the back, and one owner setting it up in a nursery said the built-in Roku was the whole reason for the purchase. Another wrote that the remote is the same style as the Roku TV they already own, so nobody in the house needed to be taught anything. That is a low bar the cheap-projector category fails constantly, and it is worth more than most spec-sheet lines.
The rest of the Cube is deliberately modest. Aurzen publishes 330 ANSI lumens, a 1500:1 contrast ratio, a 40- to 150-inch image range and a 30,000-hour light source, with a sealed optical engine to keep dust off the panel and 10W of Dolby Audio for sound. It wants a dark room. Nobody should read 330 lumens and imagine a lit patio at 8pm in July.
ONOAYO went the other way. The ONO5Pro 2.0 is built around dual 60W Dolby-tuned speakers, which is genuinely unusual at this price and is the reason the box is as big as it is. The company’s own argument is that the projector should replace a TV-plus-soundbar pairing rather than sit next to one, and on audio hardware alone that argument holds up. Ten watts against 120 watts is not a close comparison.
Around the speakers, ONOAYO lists Wi-Fi 6, HDMI 2.1, a game mode with a claimed 18ms input lag, Chromecast built in, its own Smart TV Pro OS 2.0 with YouTube, Prime Video and Disney+ preloaded, an 8,000-hour light source and the same kind of sealed optical engine. Its owners write about setup the way Aurzen’s write about Roku: several say auto focus and keystone had the picture squared away within a few minutes of plugging it in, which is the part of a cheap projector that most often goes wrong.
What ONOAYO does not publish is a brightness figure. Not a low one, not an inflated one — none at all. The listing says “ultra-high brightness output” and moves on. That is a choice, and after a year in which certified lumens have become the one number in this category anyone trusts, it stands out. Aurzen printing 330 ANSI is the less flattering number and the more useful one. We have been through this before with a pair of sub-$200 models where one brand certified 300 lumens while the other claimed 600, and the pattern repeats up the price ladder.
ONOAYO also lists 28,000:1 contrast and a 500-inch maximum image. Both are manufacturer claims with no measurement standard attached, and neither survives contact with a single-panel LCD light engine in a normal room. A 500-inch picture from an LCD projector in this class would be a dim grey rectangle roughly 40 feet wide. Aurzen’s 150-inch ceiling and 1500:1 are not better engineering, they are just a more honest description of the same underlying technology.
The useful way to read either spec sheet is to throw out the headline figures and look at what is verifiable: panel type, native resolution, published ANSI lumens where they exist, light source hours, warranty. On that list the two are close, with ONOAYO offering 1-year returns and 3-year repair against Aurzen’s flat 2-year coverage, and Aurzen’s 30,000-hour lamp rating well ahead of ONOAYO’s 8,000. Neither company published a noise figure, which for a projector with 120 watts of amplification and a triple-fan cooling system is the number worth asking about.
If the projector is going into a bedroom, a nursery or any room that already runs on Roku, the D1R Cube is the easier machine to live with and the cheaper one, and its sealed engine and 30,000-hour source suggest it will still be working long after the streaming apps have been redesigned twice. If it is going into a room with no soundbar and no plan to buy one, the ONO5Pro 2.0’s speakers are the reason to pay the extra $47, and the WiFi 6 and HDMI 2.1 stack make it the better fit for a console.
Neither is a bright-room projector, and prices at this end move constantly — both figures here are what the two were selling for in early August. The full side-by-side of every published specification is on our Aurzen EAZZE D1R Cube vs ONOAYO ONO5Pro 2.0 comparison, and if the budget can stretch further, the projectors under $1,000 list is where certified brightness figures start showing up as standard rather than as a differentiator.