Product review - Philips Magic Theatre

Submitted by stefan on Tue, 01/04/2008 - 9:50am.

A few months ago when we were trying to figure out how to get our little man to self settle at night we came across the Philips Magic Theatre. Basically it's a projector that beams rotating images onto a wall - it also plays some sounds / music. We've been using it for a wee while so I thought I'd post a quick review on it.

Let's start with the positives first - the device is easy to install and set-up, it is very safe (from what I can tell) and has been designed to be used in a nursery. There is quite a lot of information about product safety on the Philips website (great).

The image display is OK but not oustanding. It's kind of hard to get it in focus and I'm not sure how it works on coloured walls (our walls are beige so it's not too bad). The fading towards the end of the pre-set time is rather abrupt though ... so it's not like it gradually gets darker. I basically stops rotating, the music stops playing and then the light goes out.

The actual rotating image is quite small - unless you have a massive bedroom. There is no way to change the lense to make it bigger - so it ends up looking more like a small painting than a magic theatre. I was also disappointed when I realised that there was only 1 song in there and the rest was all "soothing sounds" (all two of them).

While it held the attention of Noah for a while and he was amazed at the display it didn't exactly calm him down. He immediately realised that the projection (and sounds) came from this little funny-looking apparatus. So he looked at that instead of the rotating images. After a while he got completely used to it and it didn't make a difference one way or another (in terms of his settling routine).

The really freaky thing about this device is the "heartbeat sound" ... that is just plain scary ... I couldn't listen to it. Not sure what it does for babies?

All in all probably a "pass" on that one - it's not cheap and you don't really need it (I think).

-Stef