Everybody loves a movie night, and the right projector can bring the movie theater experience home to you or to the great outdoors. The Nebula Mars 3 is an outdoor 1080p projector from the Anker subsidiary. Nebula hopes that this battery-powered, water-resistant, drop- and dust-resistant projector will become a must-have for camping trips, movie nights, or game nights. I spent some time testing the Mars 3 at my home to see if it would make a worthy purchase after I put it through its paces.

Price, availability, and specs

The Nebula Mars 3 is available from Amazon, Wal-Mart, and directly from the Nebula website. It retails for $1,049 but can frequently be found on sale

The Nebula Mars 3 is an LED lamp powered, 1080p DLP projector capable of projecting at a maximum brightness of 1000 ANSI lumens. The project is built to last with a lamp rated for 25,000 hours of use, and water resistance, dust resistance, and drop resistance all part of the package. The Mars 3 runs on Android TV, though it features an HDMI port for plugging in external devices like a Roku or gaming system.

Mostly intended for outdoor and nighttime use, the Mars 3 can throw an image up to 200 inches in diameter, and can run off its internal battery for up to 5 hours if used in Eco mode. Battery life when projected a brighter image can dip to as low as 2 hours.

What I liked about the Nebula Mars 3

The easy choice for casual movie or game nights

The best part about the Nebula Mars 3 is that it’s just so easy to use. Its lightweight and rugged build make it easy to throw into your trunk for a camping trip or to carry to a friend’s house. It would easily survive in less delicate environments, like a student house, and would perfectly to project a movie onto an exterior wall of your house during a nighttime swim or backyard hang.

A great image in the right environment

While the image maxes out at 1080p, the Mars 3 still projects a bright, color-accurate, crisp image after some calibration when used at night or in any pitch-black environment. The HDMI port makes it easy to connect a Roku device, a video game console, or a laptop for game nights or movie nights with friends.

The Mars 3 shines most during casual nighttime use, especially when you’re not taking your home theater or viewing experience too seriously. I was able to use it just fine at home once the sun went down, and its simplicity made it easy for me to carry around the house and set up quickly.

Anytime I used it without any other light source around, I was thoroughly impressed with the image quality. So much so that I would forgive its 1080p resolution.

User-friendly even for projector amateurs

For those less familiar with home projectors and wondering what “keystone” is and how to focus your projector, the Nebula Mars 3 does most of the legwork for you. Anytime I moved the projector from one area to another or shifted the position of the furniture it was sitting on, the Mars 3 automatically entered keystone and focus correction modes, using its built-in cameras to intelligently realign and refocus the image on the wall. These features went a long way in making the Mars 3 a simple “plug and play” experience.

​​​

What I didn’t like about the Nebula Mars 3

Anything other than pitch black darkness doesn’t cut it

The Nebula Mars 3 is primarily marketed as an outdoor projector, with images showing its use at a nighttime campsite or in a backyard at night. I can certainly confirm that this makes much more sense than trying to use it as a daily projector in your home in place of a television. At 1,000 ANSI lumens, the image is perfectly bright in a windowless theater room or on a dark night projected onto a reflective screen, but for daytime use, even closing all my window shutters was barely enough. This meant that to use it at all during the day, I had to turn my house into a dark cave, which was pretty depressing. Even cracking the windows slightly degrades the image tremendously. I quickly abandoned daytime use because of this.

Verdict: Should you buy the Nebula Mars 3?

The Nebula Mars 3 fits the bill for a lot of different folks and situations. Maybe you’re a college student living with roommates and you want an affordable and resilient projector to have game or movie nights at the house or apartment. Or you might be in a camping family and would love to have a movie night with the kids out at the campsite. These sorts of casual, and mostly nighttime uses are perfect for the Nebula Mars 3.

With optional battery-powered use, intelligent features, HDMI connectivity, and a rugged design, the Mars 3 brings some versatility to the table at a decent value. However, if you’re in the market for a dedicated, daily, living room projector to replace your TV, then the lack of brightness would probably deter you from this particular model.