JMGO announced a small gimbal-mounted projector called the MIGO on Thursday, 17 September, through its official Weibo account. It lists at 2,999 yuan on JD.com, roughly 450 dollars, goes on sale in China at 10am on Sunday, 20 September, and qualifies for the country’s 10 percent consumer-electronics trade-in subsidy, which takes the buyer’s price to about 2,700 yuan.
The pitch is a single word JMGO keeps repeating: vertical. The MIGO sits in a ball-shaped head on a stand and turns through a full 360 degrees, and the company says it is the first projector sold with a native portrait mode, meant for the short dramas, workout streams and phone video that Chinese audiences now watch far more than anything shot in 16:9.
A 1.2kg DLP with a zoom lens
The spec sheet is modest in the places you would expect and unusual in one. Resolution is 1080p on a DLP engine. Brightness is rated at 750 CVIA lumens, and JMGO gives the same figure in ISO lumens. Memory is 1.5GB with 64GB of storage, Wi-Fi 6 is on board, and JMGO quotes operating noise of 26dB. The body weighs 1.2kg, has a carry handle moulded into the frame and seats on a magnetic base. It comes in two colours, almond white and a yellow JMGO calls pudding.
The unusual part is the lens. The MIGO has a 1.3x optical zoom, so the picture can be resized without moving the unit, and JMGO says it is the first projector at this price in China to carry one. Anything at this size and price normally scales the image digitally, which throws away pixels every time you shrink it. Sound comes from a round, upward-firing driver meant to spread evenly around a room rather than beam forward.
JMGO has not said anything about a battery, and the announcement’s emphasis on the handle, the base and an energy-efficiency rating suggests this is a mains-powered machine that moves between rooms rather than one that goes camping.
The 31.6 percent figure checks out
JMGO’s headline claim is that a normal landscape projector showing a portrait video lights up only 31.6 percent of its pixels, and that the MIGO’s portrait mode uses all of them, a 3.16-fold gain.
That number is correct, and it is easy to verify. Put a 9:16 clip on a 1920 x 1080 panel and it can only be as tall as the panel, 1,080 pixels, which makes it 607.5 pixels wide. That is 607.5 x 1,080 out of 1,920 x 1,080, or 31.6 percent. The ratio is simply nine-sixteenths squared, and its reciprocal is the 3.16x.
What “native portrait” means in practice is less exotic than it sounds. The imaging chip is still a landscape 1080p DMD. Turning the head through 90 degrees stands that chip on its end, so a phone video fills 1,080 x 1,920 pixels and the picture on the wall is tall instead of wide. Any projector can do this if you lay it on its side. What JMGO has built is a housing and a software mode that make it the default, which for a company whose entire range is organised around gimbals is a logical next step.
One throw distance does not match the others
JMGO gives a throw ratio of 0.98 to 1.3:1 and three placement examples: 60 inches from 1.3 metres, 100 inches from 2.17 metres and 120 inches from 2.26 metres.
The first two are consistent with the wide end of that zoom. A 16:9 image 60 inches across the diagonal is 1.33 metres wide, and 1.3 metres of throw divided by that width is 0.98. The 100-inch figure works out to 0.98 as well.
The 120-inch example does not. A 120-inch 16:9 picture is 2.66 metres wide, and throwing it from 2.26 metres would need a ratio of about 0.85, shorter than the lens can go. At 0.98, a 120-inch image needs about 2.6 metres. The most likely explanation is a typo in the launch material rather than a hidden wide-angle setting, and it is the kind of thing that gets corrected on the JD listing within a week. Anyone planning a small room around that one number should wait for it.
Where it sits in JMGO’s own lineup
The closest thing JMGO sells in the United States is the PicoFlix, the bottle-shaped portable that launched at 599 dollars in 2024. It is a different kind of machine: 420 ISO lumens, no optical zoom, a 127-degree tilting gimbal rather than a full rotation, and a 10,000mAh battery rated for about four and a half hours. It also runs Google TV with licensed Netflix, which a China-market MIGO will not.
The PicoFlix’s price has already done what launch prices at this end of the market tend to do, and not evenly. JMGO’s own US store lists it at 349 dollars against a 498-dollar compare-at price. On Amazon it is 199.99 dollars this week, with a 3.5-star average from 52 ratings. The same company is selling the same projector for two prices about 150 dollars apart depending on which checkout you use.
The MIGO, on paper, is brighter by a large margin, carries the optical zoom the PicoFlix lacks and weighs about the same. What it gives up is the battery and, for now, any sign of an export plan. JMGO’s recent US launches have gone upmarket instead: the Iris Ultra Max opened preorders at 2,999 dollars at the end of August, and the N3 Ultimate sits in the same four-figure band.
Why a portrait projector now
The MIGO is aimed squarely at the short-drama boom in China, where serialised one-to-two-minute episodes shot vertically for phones have become a mass-market entertainment format in their own right. A projector that can put one of those on a bedroom wall at full resolution, or on the ceiling above a bed, is solving a problem Chinese buyers actually have. Western buyers mostly do not, yet. American small-projector shopping still revolves around landscape streaming apps, and the gimbal models that sell here, such as the PicoFlix and Dangbei’s Freedo, are sold on how easily they aim at a wall or ceiling rather than on which way up the picture is.
If the portrait idea travels, it will travel the way the gimbal did: first as a Chinese feature that looks like a gimmick from outside, then as a line in the spec sheet of the export model. The question worth asking of the MIGO’s first owners is simpler than any of that. At 750 lumens, is a 100-inch picture on a ceiling bright enough to watch with the bedroom light on? JMGO’s launch material shows it that way. Sales start on Sunday.
