Is the HY300 Projector Worth It? Only With a Streaming Stick

The HY300 is the little white projector in every dorm room and bedroom makeover video: a box pointed at the wall, a movie the size of a garage door, and a price that often sits under $60. The scene in those videos is real. What they leave out is that it was filmed in the dark, and the movie did not come from the projector’s own Netflix app.

The HY300 Pro is worth it as a nighttime bedroom projector, on one condition. Plug a streaming stick into it and ignore the software it ships with. Skip that step and you get a worse experience than the listing suggests, plus a security question you probably did not sign up for.

What the listing says versus what gets measured

Depending on the seller, Amazon listings call the HY300 “4K” and quote brightness figures from a few hundred to over ten thousand lumens. The people who put instruments on it found something more modest.

The HY300 Pro’s native panel is 1280x720. AndroidPCTV, which benchmarks this class of device, confirmed the HD panel, and earlier HY300 units shipped at 1024x768. “4K support” means it will open the file and scale it down.

German outlet Netzwelt measured brightness at about 248 lumens, in line with the 200 to 260 ANSI lumens on the more honest spec sheets. That is enough for an 80 to 100 inch image in a dark room, which is exactly what you see in the videos. Turn on a lamp and the picture fades fast.

Two more numbers that surprise buyers:

• Fan noise. AndroidPCTV measured 54 dB next to the unit, against the 32 dB on the box. If the projector sits on a nightstand a foot from your pillow, you will hear it during quiet scenes.
• Speaker. The spec sheet lists 5W drivers, and the same review found far less in practice. It is fine for YouTube and weak for anything with a soundtrack.

Netflix in SD, despite the logo on the home screen

The HY300 runs Android and puts a Netflix tile on the home screen. What it lacks is Widevine L1, the content protection level streaming services require before they send HD video. It sits at L3, and AndroidPCTV’s testing showed what that means in practice:

• Netflix at 540p, stereo only
• Prime Video at 480p
• Disney+ and Max at 720p
• Apple TV+ does not run

A 720p projector receives the biggest streaming service at less than that, and at 100 inches the difference is obvious. There is no official Google Play Store either, so adding apps means sideloading APK files from the web.

The factory firmware

In May 2026 a researcher in the US bought an HY300 Pro+ for about $35 and noticed through their own DNS filter that it started contacting suspicious domains before it had even been used. Digging into the system, he found one script that switches off Google Play Protect on first boot and another that reinstalls apps from hidden folders every time the projector powers on. Because it lives in the firmware, a factory reset leaves it in place.

The HY300 comes off the same production line under dozens of brand names, and firmware can differ from batch to batch, so this does not prove every unit is affected. It also means there is no simple way to know about yours. A device with network access and a microphone-equipped remote is not something to gamble on when the fix costs less than a pizza.

A stick in the HDMI port, and the projector stays offline

Plug a Fire TV Stick HD into the projector and never connect the HY300 to Wi-Fi. Streaming apps play at the projector’s full resolution, you get a remote and interface that receive updates, and the projector becomes a dumb display with no internet access for its factory software to use.

What the stick cannot fix is the hardware. Brightness, the 720p panel and the fan stay exactly the same. If you already know the projector will be your main screen rather than a bedroom extra, those limits are the real decision, and the sensible jump is to a name-brand portable like the XGIMI MoGo 3 Pro: native 1080p, licensed Netflix, autofocus. It still will not compete with daylight (no portable projector does), but the picture is sharp in a way the HY300 never will be.

Prices change often between sales and sellers. Check the current price before you buy.

Which setup fits you

Setup	Best for	Price range
HY300 Pro alone	Trying out a projector with YouTube and phone casting	$40 – $70
HY300 Pro + Fire TV Stick HD	Movies on the bedroom ceiling at night	$65 – $105
XGIMI MoGo 3 Pro	A portable projector as your main screen	$350 – $450

Sound is where the budget setup lets you down first, and a portable Bluetooth speaker fixes that for far less than a better projector. If the Fire TV Stick is your first Amazon device and you are wondering which Echo pairs best with it, the Echo Pop vs Echo Dot vs Echo Show 5 breakdown covers that. And since everything here depends on a dark room, a smart bulb that dims on a voice command when the movie starts makes the nightly routine a lot less fiddly.