An Honest Review of The Galaxycove Star Projector (read before you buy)

Update: This projector light lasted over a year, being on every night. Eventually, it stopped charging, and we threw it out. The battery in it failed.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve seen the Facebook or Instagram ads for the Galaxycove Star Projector. The photos and videos are convincing, to the point where they lure you in. If you’re on the checkout screen or about to splurge that $80, keep reading first.

This is a review for the Galaxy Cove projector purchased from their galaxycove.com website, not any knock-off site, the same site they advertise on social media and everywhere else.

If you don’t want to read a novel, the TL;DR is RUN AWAY. Do not deal with Galaxycove; the projectors they sell are not worth their asking price. And if you want to know what kind of company you’re dealing with, read about how they handled genuine negative reviews on their Trustpilot page.

Before we continue, this review is for the Galaxycove v1 projector that comes in an unbranded box and looks like a cheap Chinese knock-off. They released an updated version a few weeks after I ordered mine and have changed the packaging and slapped a logo on the projector itself. Don’t fall for the updated branding. Besides being able to choose some new colours, it’s the same projector.

Even though I found reviews and videos praising the projector, part of me was sceptical that these reviews were not all completely honest. Information suggested that this company was selling cheaply made Chinese products at a premium price, but I didn’t look too much into it then. The marketing got me.

It has been brought to my attention that Galaxycove is attempting to discredit reviews such as these. The claim is that people are buying from alleged “illegitimate” websites. Well, not that it matters much, but here is a screenshot of the transaction from my Internet banking.

Sure enough, I bought one and used the excuse of buying it for my son. In reality, I was the one most excited about it because the marketing made this thing seem amazing. It totalled just a little over $100 Australian Dollars after the conversion.

This better be good, I said.

It Arrived

Well, the first good sign this wasn’t a complete scam is the projector did arrive. The projector took a while to arrive in Australia, about 2.5 weeks. The Galaxycove website states a week, but when you look at the tracking information, you see it comes from China, and the pandemic has slowed everything down. The paths it took for delivery were unlike anything I had ever seen, seemingly bouncing a heap of places.

Opening up the package, you’re greeted with an unbranded generic-looking product. This looks like a product you would buy at a garage sale or find in your grandma’s basement beside the unused foot spa she got for Mother’s Day 5 years ago.

As you can see, nothing on this box suggests that it is a Galaxycove product whatsoever. The feeling that you’ve been “had” begins to set in. I was doubting if this was going to work. Sure, it might have arrived, but did they send me a projector slapped together wholesale for $3 and sold at a premium? We were about to find out.

The translated text from Chinese into English instils confidence that you’ve just bought a carefully engineered product. When the packaging is bad, it’s a red flag, especially poor translations. I did have a good laugh at the line, “enpowder your life”

Maybe there is branding inside of the box, you say? Nope. It just uses a generic name of 3 In 1 LED Starry Sky Projector Light on the instruction booklet. The booklet is quite useless, as is the case for cheaply made Chinese exports such as these. It is littered with typos and grammatical errors, indicative of poor and rushed translations.

Putting the dots together, it was clear this was a wholesale product being sold at a heavily marked-up price. I got curious, is anyone else selling this same projector? If it is being dropshipped, GalaxyCove can’t be the only one doing this.

If there is one thing in life I’ve learned, when in doubt, look on Wish. Sure enough, I found a projector that is a splitting image of the one I bought under a different name. Allegedly you can also find the same one on Aliexpress and other sites like eBay.

We haven’t even turned it on yet, and there are red flags everywhere. The above Aliexpress image shows a projector that looks identical, right down to the placement of the USB charging port, compliance writing and where the projector dome sphere sits.

In another image on the linked Aliexpress projector, even the colours it supports out of the box are the exact same as the Galaxycove colours. The moon and stars look the same, as do the buttons’ placement and functionality.

It is quite clear the Aliexpress projector is the same, at a fraction of the price. I might even buy it and then compare the two, even taking them apart and seeing how they differ from the electronics inside (they probably don’t).

Weird Website Behaviour

Here is one sign that the Galaxycove company is not who they say they are. The weird and dishonest tricks they attempted to pull on their own website shocked and surprised me. I have never seen any other site do what the Galaxycove site does.

They have made all attempts to right-click and disable any attempts to open up browser developer tools. If you are using Chrome, give it a try yourself. They do not want anyone viewing their website source code or copying their images or text.

Try right-clicking anywhere on the site; it doesn’t work. Then try selecting any of the text on the site, such as the product page here. Text selection has been disabled, which is just weird.

I still managed to open developer tools and encountered another trap that blocked me from using your browser developer tools. The Galaxycove website has a timer running every 1000 milliseconds (every second) with a debugger statement being called. A debugger statement signals to the developer tools to break on that particular line of code; it’s an attempt to disable the standard behaviour of the developer tools.

setInterval(function(){ debugger; },1000)

The code above is an attempt to prevent people from viewing their code, which made me even more curious: what is Galaxycove trying to hide on their website? Nothing is proprietary here, just basic HTML, CSS and Javascript for a product website.

It turns out that Galaxycove is hosted on Shopify, and they are using a Shopify addon called Cozy AntiTheft. The thing is, the plugin doesn’t even do what it says it does. It prevents text selection and keyboard shortcuts, but you can still open developer tools.

While I did not uncover any hidden secrets or tricks in the website itself, I did find it odd they installed such a plugin for their Shopify store.

Fake product images

The website shows the projector itself should have a Galaxycove logo on it. Upon closer inspection, it appears the text was added after the fact.

Taking the projector out of the box, one thing stands out immediately: no logo on the product itself is present.

The website images were edited mock-ups, not uncommon even for reputable companies, but they Photoshopped their logo onto the images to make it look like a legitimate product. The projector has no logo that comes in the box.

This is intentionally misleading now.

Another annoying thing is that it ships with a USB adapter with an American plug. Obviously, being in Australia, an American wall outlet is useless. Fortunately, I had a spare phone charger adapter I could use.

Mystery SC511

Upon closer inspection, I noticed on the back of the projector there is a model number SC511 which once again seemed odd. What would happen if I Googled that? As it would turn out, a whole bunch of identical projectors show up using that model number, including a few on Amazon. This one here shows the same product.

Interestingly, this listing details some specifics down the bottom.

Galaxycove, at every turn, is trying to make itself appear to be a company they are not. Not only do they claim they design and build their products themselves (calling themselves light experts, amongst other titles), but they portray themselves as the Apple of light products.

More Fake Images

The Galaxycove hole digs deeper, and once again, Galaxycove employs its favourite trick: fake images.

This is the Galaxycove about us page, where they show stock-looking photos of designer-looking people working on computers. They talk about being light experts and speaking as though they painstakingly designed and architected this themselves.

That is because the images on their About page are stock photos. I took a snippet of the photos and then searched TinyEye, and sure enough, those people do not work at Galaxycove. Look at this link; it’s the same picture used on the Galaxycove about us page.

This is the image from the Galaxycove about page

And this is the one from the website where I found the same stock photo in use.

If you look closely, you will also notice they put a weird blur over the mockups on the screen in their image. The reason they did this was most likely an attempt to cover up the fact they edited the image.

Fake Reviews

The clue in Galaxycove being a semi-legitimate drop-shipping operation is the botted reviews. Looking at the product page, there are way too many 5-star reviews, but there are cleverly some 3-star reviews (but they do not say anything critical about the product itself).

Funnily enough, I left a review of my own and waited for it to appear on the site. It never showed up. Clearly, they only show the highly-rated ratings, possibly delete anything critical of their drop-shipped projector and portray the image of a loved company shipping a great product.

The real reviews for this product are over at TrustPilot, where you can imagine the real story is being told. Allegedly whoever is running this company keeps changing their name. They were previously known as Luxavate.

The upside is that it wasn’t a complete and total scam. The projector arrived, and when I queried them about the delay, they responded quickly and apologised. They try and make people perceive they are a legitimate business selling premium products, but the blatant fake reviews, weird return/refund policy and fake about page are red flags.

Does it work?

In my case, yes. We took it out of the cheap generic-looking box, found a spare phone charger and plugged it in and waited for it to charge.

The projector worked. It didn’t throw light as much as the smart misleading marketing would have you believe or all of the 5-star, “omg this is amazing”, and “my cat loves this laser lol” reviews clearly left by fake/paid accounts. Is this worth $80 USD? Definitely not. For me, it ended up being over $100, and I have zero confidence this laser will last more than a few months.

If your projector does work, it won’t impress you. Once you realise the colour choices are limited, that the music sense mode will most likely not work and that the amount of light being projected isn’t nearly as much as the marketing materials depict, you realise this is a waste of money.

My five-year-old son loves it and is currently using it as a nightlight. That’s one damn expensive nightlight. And look, there is nothing wrong with drop shipping, but masquerading behind a business front, being dishonest, and charging top prices for products worth half what they’re charging is one of the many reasons to avoid Galaxycove.

When I get a chance, I will open this projector up and see what the build and component quality are like inside. I am expecting some serious shortcuts lurking within. The inbuilt rechargeable battery is what scares me the most.

Would I advise you to buy one? Definitely not. You can allegedly pay half the amount and get the same projector elsewhere, do that instead. If you buy the Galaxycove projector, you will be disappointed.