Royole Moon 3D Mobile Theater Review

You’ll feel like you are looking at a large screen, and to top it off, the Royole Moon offers high quality noise reduction headsets to provide you your own head-mounted viewing room for travel or just privacy at home.

The Royole Moon 3D Mobile Theater is going to appeal to many home theater fans looking for the solution to viewing movies on long flights or just creating a private space at home so you can get excellent video and audio without disturbing the kids, your partner or the neighbors.

In theory, this is a good idea, somewhat akin to personal music players, like the Astell and Kern Kann I’ve recently reviewed. Think of the Royole Moon 3D Mobile Theater as the Kann adding video along with high quality audio. Head mounted video displays are getting more popular now, but most are aimed at VR viewing, and the Royole Moon is not a VR headset. It’s literally a home theater system for your head.

Royole is not a typical consumer electronics company. It was founded in Fremont, California, Hong Kong and Shenzhen China by Stanford engineering graduates in 2012, with the mission to improve the way people interact with and perceive the world. Royole creates and manufactures next-generation human-machine interface technologies and products such as advanced flexible displays, flexible sensors, and smart devices. Royole is not the first company to manufacture immersive headsets. Sony took a run at head mounted displays starting in 2011. The HMZ-T1, still sold in some outlets today, offered 720p resolution as well as 3D. It wasn’t battery powered, so you were tethered to a wall outlet. It weighed about 15 ounces, while the Royole Moon comes in a little more at 1.54 lbs. Of course the Royole has a battery, while the Sony does not need one.

The Royole Moon exudes quality. I was sent the black edition with gold accents on the headphone bands and ear cups, with the rest of the headset finished in attractive brown leather.

The Royole Moon 3D Mobile Theater offers 32GB of internal storage and can store your movies, home videos, and personal photos. You can also plug in several video sources including HDMI, USB or use Wi-Fi to connect to web based content. You can also plug the Royole Moon into a video game console’s HDMI output and play your games on the device.

The Royole Moon 3D Mobile Theater folds flat for transport.

It consists of the headset itself, and an external flat box, thinner than a pack of cigarettes, that gives you inputs for other devices as well as a rechargeable battery pack. Royole calls this their Moon Box. You can also run the Royole Moon off AC power with the included adaptor, which also serves as the battery charger. A single cable connects the outboard box to the headsets.

The Royole Moon has its own operating system that sits on top of the ubiquitous Android OS. When you first power on the Royole Moon, you see a screen with setup options, including connecting to your Wi-Fi network. The right ear cup of the headphones has a touchpad, so you can type letters and numbers into the appropriate data fields, and then tap to enter your user name and password for your network.

The Royole Moon comes preloaded with some movie trailers, some still photos, and some 3D video clips.

The outboard Moon Box holds 32 GB of your own material for display on the headset. When you first put the headset on, there’s a good chance it won’t fit, but you’ll soon discover the headset can expand or contract to fit your head. There are also adjustments for the width of the optics, to match how far your eyes are set apart. You can also adjust focus, which was necessary for me, as usually I need reading glasses for close up work, and the two video screens are very close to your eyes, even though they simulate a large screen in a large room.

I was happy to see that I could adjust the lenses to give me a very sharp image, so I did not need my glasses, which wouldn’t fit easily in the head mounted display anyway.

When you first put on the headset, you are greeted by a home screen that lets you connect to your local Wi-Fi system. There is a web browser for looking at the web, and even finding videos to play there. You can also browse media you’ve moved to the headset storage, be it music, photos or videos. Or you can watch video or listen to audio, or both, while connected to an external Blu-ray player, which is how I did the bulk of my auditioning.

The noise reduction works and is an added bonus for filtering out distracting outside sounds.

At about a pound and a half, the Royole Moon is not light. If not properly adjusted, it can feel pretty awkward on your head, and it will press down on your nose if you don’t balance the headset properly. Having said that, I found the best way to use the headset was in a comfortable chair with a headrest. Using the Royole Moon that way I could watch a complete movie with acceptable comfort. Without head support, it wouldn’t have been as easy. Of course on an airplane flight headrests are there for the using. At home, you just have to get in a comfortable position.

I was able to confirm the stated 5 hour battery life claim. I watched two movies back to back, with battery to spare.

What about the competition? I haven’t looked at every head-mounted video player in existence. I have tried a couple of the Sony units and while awkward, they had good video. Audio was weak, and the Royole Moon has a significant edge in audio quality.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the new Oculus Go headset. It’s more for the VR crowd, but it does advertise movie playback, so I thought it was worth a look. At $199.00 it’s considerably cheaper than the Royole Moon, and with its VR features the Oculus seems like a bargain. But the video quality really doesn’t hold a candle to the Royole Moon. While the Oculus Go is advertised as HD, you get a very definite ‘screen door’ effect watching video playback. What you are seeing is the pixel structure of the screens which are very close to your eyes. It’s not awful by any means, but it is no substitute for the quality of the Royole Moon AMOLED screens. The Oculus Go has no HDMI input, so you’ve got to either watch streamed content, or get some movie files on it in a format the Oculus permits.

THE ROYOLE MOON meets its advertised claims, with an excellent picture and sound to match. For private viewing it’s a great choice.

The Royole Moon is a niche product. Not everyone will want to watch movies in a totally private setting. Still, there are the use cases I’ve described; not bothering family members, or for travel. The Royole Moon provides excellent video and audio quality. It can be uncomfortable to wear for long sessions, but those issues can be largely eliminated if you have head support while viewing.

At a price of $800.00, the Royole Moon is not an impulse purchase, but it does what it claims in a nicely built and highly flexible package. For 3D lovers faced with nothing to buy in the flat screen category, the Royole Moon is sent from heaven.