YABER K2s Smart Projector

Light and color

Trusted Reviews says the figure is not bright and wants the curtains drawn; Lifehacker points to night-time or low-light rooms. PCMag judged the image he saw at roughly 600 lumens with his own settings, bright enough to fill a 90-inch 1.0-gain screen in a dark room and watchable in a family room at night with the lights on.

Color is where the measurements hurt. Whites looked grey and blacks a little muddy. PCMag found every factory picture mode blue-shifted out of the box, and because no mode exposes a brightness or black-level control, shadow detail in the darkest scenes cannot be corrected. The manual adjustments are thin: contrast, saturation, sharpness and hue on top of the presets.

Room size matters as much as light. Nobody has published a measured ANSI output at the lens, a measured contrast ratio or colour uniformity for this model, and no failure rate has been published either, so treat the brightness rating as a rating and the color findings as a known limitation rather than a defect.

Setup and streaming

The bundled dongle is the strongest single feature and the least consistent across sources. Coverage is partial. YABER’s current product page describes an officially licensed Google TV system instead, so check which system the unit in front of you ships with. ManTripping calls the built-in system Android TV with more than 7,000 apps and Lifehacker puts the store at more than 9,000.

Setup takes two passes. PCMag reports that auto keystone and auto focus blank the image every time the projector is nudged, which helps for a quick wall projection and gets in the way when you want the image to land exactly on a screen. The same review notes the Wi-Fi network has to be joined twice, once for the projector and once for the dongle, and that HDMI CEC must be switched on before a single remote can drive both. Trusted Reviews finds the two remotes fiddly and the removable lens cap easy to lose. Expert Reviews found auto focus hard to make crisp on both sides of the frame unless the projector and screen sit at ideal angles, and noted the only mechanical adjustment is a vertical tilt leg, with a digital zoom that only shrinks the image.

The fan is audible in quiet scenes. That mode also drops brightness to 60% of normal.

The NFC screencast needs the EShare app installed first, and the NFC tag works with Android phones. Alexa needs a separate smart speaker: expert reviewers found no built-in microphone in the projector itself. Owner evidence is thin here. The only buyer feedback in the sources is YABER’s own store reviews, which carry the vendor’s selection bias, and no forum threads, failure reports or owner complaint data for this exact model were found.

Sound, running costs and warranty

Sound is what reviewers rate above the price. Expert Reviews called the Dolby Audio system rich and clear and watched several evenings of films without reaching for a soundbar. PCMag agreed the pair fills a small or medium family room, and noted that the single LCD chip carries the same cell count as three-chip designs, so there are no rainbow artifacts.

Ownership costs stay low. The light source is a white LED rated at 20,000 hours, so lamp replacement is not a near-term bill, and there are no filters, pods or subscriptions. The optional extras are a projection screen and a spare K Series remote control, both sold by YABER, plus the cleaning kit already in the box for the lens. No service-parts catalogue, no spare-lens offering and no published repair data exist for this model.

Warranty terms need checking at the register. ProjectorCentral and PCMag both record 3 years for the K2s.

Is it worth it?

Value depends on the price you pay. The only US figure in the sources is ProjectorCentral’s $300 street price against a $599 MSRP, and PCMag refers to a $600 list price. The UK verdicts point the same way: Trusted Reviews calls the K2s good value under £500, and Expert Reviews, which measured the color problem, puts the sweet spot at around £350 and tells buyers above that to look for more vivid pictures. YABER’s own page, read in a euro locale, showed €429.00 against a €599.99 compare-at price, and iGeekphone recorded a Banggood price of $405.99 with coupon code BGKBLD in March 2024.

Trusted Reviews says spending more on the XGIMI Horizon gets better results. On those thresholds the K2s is reasonable at $300 or below for someone who wants one box for streaming and sound, and hard to justify at $599, where a brighter and better-measured projector costs only a little more.

Which model this is

This page covers the YABER K2s smart projector, the CES 2023 model with 800 ANSI lumens and native 1080p, sold as ASIN B0BW39Y3GC.

Do not confuse it with the K2s Pro, the K3, the K3 Pro, the K300s or the Ace K1. YABER’s own site puts the K2s and the K2s Pro on one page, and the K3-series page calls the K2s the model it replaced.

Sources

Manufacturer:

• YABER K2s official product page
• YABER shipping policy and warranty
• YABER unveils the K2s at CES 2023 — Yaber news release

Independent reviews:

Owner reports:

• Months of ownership with the Yaber K2s — Lifehacker

Specifications cross-check:

• Search results for YABER K2s projector listings — Marginalia Search