Projector Reviews

The Advanced Settings submenu in the Horizon Pro's Custom Image Mode menu offers a Local Contrast adjustment with Strong, Medium, Weak, and Off options. I found that these had little subjective effect on image quality, though my contrast ratio measurements indicated that the Strong option yielded slight black level improvements. Another Advanced menu option is Motion Compensation, a setting that resulted in strong "soap opera" effect at all levels (I switched it to Off). The projector's Noise Reduction adjustment resulted in a loss of picture detail at all settings, and it should be completely avoided except for maybe viewing poor- quality 1980s music videos streamed from YouTube.

HD/SDR Performance
The Horizon Pro produced a satisfyingly bright image—one that should serve it well in the wide range of environments it's likely to find itself set up in. Colors were also rich and robust after calibration, so much so that I felt the need to knock back the Saturation setting a few steps. Like many other 4K DLP projectors we've tested, the XGIMI's main weakness was contrast: The best-case contrast ratio was 500:1, well below the 3,225:1 I measured when I tested LG's HU810PW 4K DLP projector, although that model costs nearly twice as much as the Horizon Pro.

Starting out with Blu-ray, I watched The Elephant Man (2020 Criterion Collection remastered edition) to get a sense of the projector's image uniformity and overall handling of basic black and white material. While the black level was expectedly elevated, the projector cleanly displayed the film's wide range of subtle gray tones, and highlight detail was also finely rendered. The image also looked impres- sively uniform, with no sign of tinting or of brightness dips from the center to the edge of the screen. Black and white movies are a torture test for DLP "rainbows," and I did note a few, though mostly during the title sequence. Overall, these were minimal and not a distraction.

Another movie I watched on the Horizon Pro was Mandibles, a French comedy about two hapless dudes who discover a giant fly and train it be their partner in crime. (Trust me, the movie is a lot funnier than that sounds.) Streamed from Apple TV+, the HD-quality image looked appealingly crisp, and there was no noise or other artifacts to distract from the overall bright, punchy image. Colors popped nicely, and the skin tones of the human, non-insect characters also had a consistently natural look.

Ultra HD/HDR Performance
To evaluate the Horizon Pro's handling of 4K/HDR, I watched a few key scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey on both Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray disc. The early cave scenes where the pre-human creatures gather lacked shadow depth and had an overall flat appearance when viewed on Blu-ray, and the same could be said for the first outer space shots, where the black of deep space looked more of a dark gray. Switching over to Ultra HD Blu-ray, shadows in the cave scene displayed greater depth, and I noted a slight improvement in shadow detail and contrast. Blacks in the outer space shots also looked deeper, and the starfields had an improved sense of "pop." Unfortunately, the Horizon Pro lacks any kind of contrast-improving HDR adjustment—a feature found on projectors from Epson and some other makers—to adapt its tone mapping for 4K discs and streams with varying HDR maximum brightness levels.

When comparing the regular and 4K versions of 2001 on disc, I was struck by how much of a visual improvement 4K brought about, and how clearly the XGIMI delivered the detail boost on the Ultra HD version of the disc. Watching another remastered classic film, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, on Ultra HD Blu-ray, the difference between the soft-focus close-up shots of Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and the standard focus applied to shots of other cast members was clearly visible. And in the scenes where the angry fowl flock and attack Bodega Bay, the primitive-looking (though I'm sure it was impressive at the time) optical printing effects used to superimpose birds over the fleeing, terrified townsfolk revealed their jagged edges.

The Horizon Pro's built-in Harman Kardon audio system sounded impressive, rendering voices, sound effects, and music cleanly even at loud volume levels. I'm sure that most people setting up the projector in temporary locations for movie or sports viewing will be completely pleased with its audio performance. And if you want an even better experience, the HDMI-ARC port lets you easily link it to an external soundbar or surround speaker system and will pass 5.1 Dolby Digital sound from programs streamed via its built-in apps. The projector's Chromecast built-in and Bluetooth 5.0 features also let you use it as a wireless speaker for streaming music from your phone, in which case you have the option to shut off the video display via the setup menu.

Conclusion
XGIMI's Horizon Pro is a compelling, though pricey, option for anyone looking for a compact, high-performance projector capable of being easily moved from room to room. It delivers crisp Ultra HD detail, more than sufficient brightness even for viewing in relatively high ambient light environments, and its built-in audio system should prove satisfactory for most situations. Also, its impressive auto-setup features get you up and running in almost no time with a well- aligned, crisply focused image each time you point it at a wall or screen.

As with many other 4K DLP projectors we've tested, contrast is the Horizon Pro's key picture quality shortcoming, and that's something movie fans may find hard to overlook. Along the same lines, its limited advanced picture adjustments make ISF-style calibration a challenge. And the fact that it loses stored picture settings after unplugging struck me as plain odd for a portable projector touting above- average video performance. But even with those caveats, the Horizon Pro delivered the best overall performance of any "portable" projector I've tested so far. If I owned a weekend/ vacation home, I certainly wouldn't mind toting one along for movie night.

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