PMA Research, the firm that has sold projector shipment data to the display industry for three decades, has put a study on sale covering a category it has never separately counted: the single-panel LCD projector, the $40-to-$100 box that arrives from a Shenzhen ODM under a brand name nobody has heard of. The company announced the European and UK report on its own newsroom on August 26, and the pro-AV trade press picked it up on September 1, when Inavate ran the release. PMA already publishes quarterly worldwide sell-in numbers and monthly North American sell-through for projectors. 1LCD needed a study of its own, and the reason given in the announcement is that the segment sits outside the professional AV channel entirely.
That is a polite way of saying the industry’s existing instruments cannot see it. Sell-in reporting works by asking manufacturers what they shipped into distribution. A category whose manufacturers are anonymous marketplace storefronts has nobody to ask.
We have been logging Amazon’s US projector best-seller list every day since July 28, which gives a five-week picture of the same category on the other side of the Atlantic. On the most recent pull, 19 of the top 24 sold for under $100. Fourteen were under $60. Eight were under $50. The median across the whole list was $59.99. The cheapest thing on it was a $16.97 Christmas scene projector; the most expensive was Epson’s $329.99 EpiqVision Flex CO-W01.
Epson is the only company on that list of 24 that would turn up in a conventional projector market report, and its entry is a three-chip machine rather than a 1LCD one. Eight of the remaining storefronts have names that read like generated passwords: YGSKK, ClokoWe, Alwtniet, Sainyer, Geylnxng, Xorytin, Thunrlge, Tecaki. Most of the rest are house brands built for the marketplace and nothing else, Magcubic, TMY, AKIYO, HAPPRUN, NICPOW, PANSEBA. Only Aurzen and ELEPHAS have done anything a traditional AV company would recognise, which in both cases means licensing Roku and putting it on the box. Between them the 24 listings carry 78,862 customer ratings.
The churn is what breaks conventional tracking. Comparing our July 28 snapshot against the September 2 one, only ten of the original 24 products were still on the list. Fourteen had been replaced. Across the five weeks in between, 69 distinct products cycled through those 24 slots. A quarterly report that samples this market once every ninety days is describing a shelf that has turned over more than twice since the previous look.
Prices moved in a direction that is easy to misread. The median went up, from $52.48 to $59.99, while the average went down, from $102.40 to $84.57. Nothing got cheaper in any meaningful sense. What happened is that the handful of $250-to-$500 outliers on the July list, two ONOAYO units and a $299.99 outdoor model, fell off and were replaced by more $40 and $50 boxes, dragging the mean down while the crowded middle drifted up a few dollars. Read either number on its own and you get the wrong story, which is close to the problem PMA is proposing to solve.
Listing copy in this category follows a house style. The title promises 4K. The fifth or sixth bullet, well below the fold, discloses that native resolution is 720p and that 4K describes what the machine will accept over HDMI. The $59.99 Magcubic at rank 4 does this. So does the $49.99 HY300PRO at rank 12. The $59.99 Wowlink at rank 13 is unusually direct about the underlying hardware, describing an LCD light engine at native 720p in the same breath as the 4K playback claim.
Brightness claims wander further. The rank 1 unit at $73.99 advertises 300 ANSI lumens. A $99.99 Magcubic three places below it claims 600 ANSI. A $59.99 unit claims 200. None of these arrive with a CVIA or ISO figure attached, and none name a measurement condition. Buyers in this band are not comparing specifications so much as comparing photographs of specifications, which is roughly what the report means when it lists buyer behaviour alongside market size as something worth studying.
There is one specification the cheap end cannot fake, and it shows up by omission. Read the app lists on the sub-$100 best sellers and the same three names recur: Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu. Netflix is missing from every one of them. Netflix certification requires a licensing relationship and a hardware DRM path that an anonymous storefront has no route to, so these boxes ship with a browser wrapper, a sideloaded APK, or nothing at all, and the buyer finds out after the unboxing.
That line is not drawn at a technology boundary. It is drawn at a corporate one. Dangbei’s N2 mini is a single-panel LCD projector with an LED source, the same optical architecture as the $50 units, rated at 200 ISO lumens with a genuine 1920×1080 panel behind it. It sells for $199 on Amazon and $199 on Dangbei’s own store, which lists it down from $229 — the same price in both places, which is less common in this business than it should be. What the extra money buys is not a different display technology. It is licensed Netflix on board, automatic focus and keystone that spare the owner from squaring the image by hand, and a company with an address to send a warranty claim to.
The most interesting line in PMA’s announcement is the last item in the scope: whether 1LCD works as an onboarding path into higher-value projection. Put plainly, the industry wants to know whether the person who bought a $50 box in 2024 is the person who buys a $1,500 laser projector in 2028, or whether they are someone who now believes projectors are a $50 product and will never pay more.
Nobody has the data to answer that, which is presumably why it is worth commissioning. What evidence exists points both ways. The Chinese market, where the cheap end matured first, saw smart projector sales fall 26 percent in the first half of this year even as the entry tier got brighter, which reads less like a feeder market and more like a ceiling. Against that, Xiaomi putting a 999-yuan single-panel LCD model on shelves under the Redmi badge suggests at least one large brand thinks the traffic is worth owning, whatever it converts into later.
PMA’s chief operating officer, Lee Dodson, pitched the report on influence rather than volume, saying 1LCD “has become a meaningful consumer category” with the potential to shape pricing and product expectations. That much is observable without a report. Anyone who has watched a shopper set a $59.99 listing claiming 4K next to a $1,200 projector rated at 2,700 ISO lumens knows the expectations were set somewhere, and it was not in the professional AV channel. The question the trade cannot answer from its own instruments is what a European buyer does eighteen months later, when the fan gets loud and the panel starts to yellow, and whether the answer is a second $60 box or a first real one.
For the same category seen from the buyer’s side, our current shortlists cover projectors under $100 and projectors under $200, and we have run a head-to-head on two best sellers forty dollars apart, one with a streaming platform inside and one that ships a stick and tells you it is optional.