A Quick Review? This is a review on a Product after 24 hours of “access.” According Squirrel Software, Reflector 3 is “A Wireless Mirroring and Streaming Receiver for Phone Tablets and Computers.” In short, this will let me stream my Phone screen to my PC. But really how well does it work?
For Privacy Reasons, I may alter screen shots to not show personal information.
So After installing on my PC, and starts running. It seems to be waiting for me to connect something. It also shows that I can Record and Broadcast something as well. There’s a webcam Icon, and there is a Mic icon.
My Sony Xperia Phone sees my Pc as a “Cast” target. With a few taps on my phone, my PC shows a copy of the Phone screen, but with short Delay.
I can take screen shots and even Videos of the phone screen on my PC. It even works with my own Nexus 7 2013 tablet.
It appears to do exactly what it said it would.
I can connect both my tablet and phone at the same time, and even record them if I so wanted.
Due to the way it works my older Android 1.5 and 4.0 Phones lack the software built in to the OS to Cast to Reflector 3.
Issues
I noticed something wrong with my Screen. The footage is 720p, on both the Xperia Phone and Nexus Tablet My images show colour bleeding. The colour bleeding was consistent, and I’ve seen alot of this before, in my own images.
Most of the images I upload to this site has to fit a certain size, for larger images, I during the compression, I shrink the image file sizes by using YUV 4:2:0 compression. This actually does alter the images by altering how they store the colour. However, most of my images are 1080p or larger, and this compression is harder to spot on a large image. However, this isn’t the case with the Xperia’s 406 by 720 image, that is then upscaled to 1080p. (Using the Devices in Landscape mode better filled the screen better, and hid the issues better.)
I believe that this isn’t an issue with the Reflector Software, but a limitation on the Casting feature build in to Android, as I replicated the effect using a 2nd Gen ChromeCast device. The 2nd Gen Chrome cast outputs at 720p at 60 FPS, or 1080 at 30 FPS. My devices output at 720p on the TV and the colour bleeding was still present.
Alternatives
I should point out there are alternative software that replicate this functionality. The limited numbers of Software packages that I’ve tried require software to be installed on the Phone or tablet itself. In a few cases, I also need to plug the phone or tablet in to PC. However in these cases, the image quality may actually be higher.
There is also screen capture Software that will record on the the Phones or Tablet’s internal storage, as well as some software that may let you stream online directly.
Note: I purchased a 1 user licence due to a Humble Bundle deal in July 2018, alongside some other software. There is also a time limited trail for this software available.