Two projectors on Amazon’s best-seller list are currently five cents apart. The HAPPRUN H1 has been sitting at $84.93 in every pull we have logged since 28 July. The Miroir Roku TV Smart Projector is $84.98, and it is new — it first showed up in our tracking on 14 August at No. 24, and by 19 August it had climbed to No. 19.
On paper the HAPPRUN wins on the numbers that normally decide these things. It is native 1920×1080 on a single-panel LCD against the Miroir’s 1280×720. It claims 250 ANSI lumens against 150. It will throw up to 200 inches; the Miroir stops at 100. At the same money, that reads like a straightforward answer.
It is not, because the HAPPRUN has no operating system.
HAPPRUN does not hide this. The listing’s fifth bullet point is a compatibility pitch for Fire TV Stick and Chromecast, which is a polite way of saying the projector has an HDMI port and nothing behind it. Turn it on with nothing plugged in and you get an input menu. There is Bluetooth 5.1 for sending audio out, and that is the extent of the smart features.
The Miroir is the opposite arrangement. It ships with officially licensed Roku TV built into the projector — not a sideloaded app store, not a stripped Android build with a Netflix icon that opens a browser, but the actual Roku platform with the full channel store behind it, Netflix and Disney+ and Prime Video included. You create a free Roku account on first boot and that is the setup finished. There is no second remote and no dongle hanging off the back.
Price that difference honestly and the five cents disappears. A Fire TV Stick 4K runs about $50 at list. Roku’s own Streaming Stick moved to $79.99 this year, a rise we traced back to memory costs in August. So the HAPPRUN is an $85 projector that costs $135 to $165 to actually use, unless you already have a spare stick in a drawer — which, to be fair, a lot of people do. The Miroir is an $85 projector that costs $85.
That reframes the comparison. You are not choosing between 1080p and 720p at the same price. You are choosing between 1080p at roughly $145 all-in and 720p at $85, and whether the extra resolution is worth about seventy percent more money on a machine at this end of the market.
Neither of these is bright. Both listings lean hard on backyard movie nights, and both are wrong to. At 250 ANSI lumens the HAPPRUN needs full darkness to hold a watchable image at 100 inches; at 150 the Miroir needs full darkness and a smaller picture. Any porch light, any streetlamp through a gap in the fence, and the contrast collapses. These are bedroom-wall and blackout-curtain projectors, and both of them are honest performers inside those limits.
Owner feedback splits along predictable lines. HAPPRUN buyers keep returning to durability and fan noise — several describe years of use in a bedroom and living room, and the quiet fan comes up repeatedly. The recurring qualifier in those same reviews is “for the price,” usually followed by an explicit acknowledgement that it is not a high-end projector, which is a fair and rare thing to find in a five-star review.
Miroir feedback is dominated by how little there is to do. Owners describe plugging it in, pointing it at a wall and starting a show, and more than one mentions aiming it at the ceiling and watching from bed, which the 270-degree stand makes trivial. The most useful negative review comes from a buyer with low vision who needed a large image and found that at the distance required they were standing in the beam every time they reached for the remote. That is not a defect; it is what 150 lumens and a manual focus ring add up to in a small room.
On setup the Miroir is ahead again: auto keystone correction against the HAPPRUN’s manual vertical-only adjustment. Both use manual focus. Neither has autofocus, and at this price neither should be expected to.
There is a third machine worth knowing about before you spend $85, because it resolves the trade rather than splitting it. The Dangbei N2 mini is $199 and gives you both halves: native 1080p on LCD, 200 ISO lumens, and Google TV with a properly licensed Netflix app rather than a workaround, plus automatic focus and automatic keystone so the picture squares itself when you move it. That is $114 more than the Miroir, or roughly $55 more than a HAPPRUN with a stick attached — and it removes every compromise this comparison is built around.
Then the Miroir is the better buy for most people, and it is not close. A 720p image at 80 inches in a dark bedroom is perfectly watchable, and the thing that determines whether a cheap projector gets used or ends up in a cupboard is almost never resolution — it is whether turning it on requires a hunt for a second remote. Roku’s interface is the most boring, most reliable streaming platform on the market, and having it activated inside the projector at this price is genuinely new.
The HAPPRUN keeps its case in exactly two situations. If you already own a Fire TV Stick or a Chromecast, the arithmetic flips and you get native 1080p and a hundred extra lumens for the same $85. And if you want a picture larger than 100 inches, the Miroir simply will not go there. Three weeks of price stability and a permanent residence near the top of the best-seller list say a lot of people are in one of those two camps.
The full spec split is laid out side by side in our HAPPRUN H1 versus Miroir Roku TV comparison, and both machines appear in the wider under-$200 shortlist alongside the rest of this price band.