Xgimi Horizon Pro 4K projector review: Beautiful new world

After our hands-on with the Casiris A6 ultra-short-throw laser projector and the Aura 4K UST also from Xgimi, we are now once again turning our attention to a normal-throw projector. The Xigimi Horizon Pro is the successor to (or the larger sibling of) the Xgimi Horizon Full HD projector and is, together with the Aura, one of the current flagships made by the company. Despite its relatively compact form factor, the LED projector is capable of delivering pretty high brightness and offers potentially great image quality.

That said, it also has to prove itself against similarly bright UST projectors that we previously reviewed. The Horizon Pro is brimming with features, with Google and Android playing a special role in this; Xgimi uses the term “home smart projector”. So without further ado, let us get right into its technical specs.

The Horizon Pro has a standard resolution of 3,840 x 2,160, and you can find “native 4K” mentioned on its product page. But upon further enquiry, we were told that 4K resolution is achieved through pixel-shifting technology. It would be a surprise to see anything other than that in this price range.

Xgimi claims the projector can get as bright as 2,200 ANSI lumens in the brightest mode, measured on a projection area of 80 inches. The product has Chromecast built-in and runs on Android TV. Roughly 24 GB of the 32 GB internal memory can be used for storing files.

The device also comes with 2 GB of RAM and supports HDR10 and HLG. According to Xgimi, the projection size can range between 40 and a massive 200 inches. In the fine print, though, Xgimi recommends not exceeding 150 inches, as image quality may otherwise suffer too much.

Roughly speaking, the Horizon Pro is shaped like a cuboid. Nonetheless, its design is significantly more refined, featuring highly rounded corners and edges. Owing to its shape, the projector appears highly compact and is much smaller than both its UST relatives and typical lamp projectors.

The product could almost pass as a portable projector if it were just a smidge smaller. Colour-wise, the chassis design is defined by matt black and dark silver grey. The top, bottom and back are made of black plastic.

And silver-grey metal wraps around the device. There are a few buttons on the top and also a thread on the bottom for mounting the device to a stand. You’ll find various ports and air vents on the back of the unit, whilst the front houses the lens as well as the camera and sensor hardware for auto keystone correction and auto focus.

The speaker grills curve around the chassis. Our review unit seems to have great workmanship: we didn’t notice any clearance issues or creaking noise coming from the chassis. You can connect wirelessly to the Horizon Pro via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

It also has all essential physical connections, including LAN and optical ports. The only downside is that the projector doesn’t offer a DisplayPort. Plug in a projector, switch it on and enjoy a glorious cinema experience – this is what a manufacturer’s promise sounds like most of the time.

But the Horizon Pro shows us that things may not go as easy or fast as imagined. First of all, you need to find a good location to set up the projector and especially get the distance to the screen right. This is because the Horizon Pro doesn’t have a physical zoom button for you to adjust image size independent of the throw distance.

That said, there is at least a digital zoom in the settings to let you shrink the image artificially. The lack of physical zoom means the Horizon Pro is often going to end up right in front of or beside the viewer, thus making the device more or less a medium-throw projector. In the pictures provided by Xgimi, the projector is likewise positioned in front of the sofa.

The built-in speakers also can’t properly showcase their sound quality when placed behind the viewer. When turning on the projector for the first time, you are required to connect it to the Internet via LAN or Wi-Fi before you can proceed further in the setup. We chose the Wi-Fi route because we didn’t want to dig out a long Ethernet cable.

But even after entering our Wi-Fi password twice correctly, we simply couldn’t get the device to connect to our network. Other devices didn’t have this problem. We were therefore unable to use the projector at that point and decided to focus on other things first because we were frustrated by the Internet access requirement.

The Wi-Fi connection suddenly started working when we gave it another try a few days later: the password was already saved and we didn’t have to re-enter it. So now it’s time to get started, right? Nope, not quite yet. The device wanted us to create an Android account or log in to Google.

There is no way around this as well. Subsequently, we had to agree to Google’s terms of service and privacy (chortle) policy. But at least we were allowed to decide whether we want to share our location (no) and activate the voice assistant (which we tested).

Now we can finally get started. . .

What, an update? Fine, let us quickly install the update. But 1. 14 GB for a projector system update? Oh well, giving up is no longer an option now.

So we downloaded and installed the update, then restarted the system. Done. Easy-peasy – kind of.

After all that, we were finally greeted by Android TV’s home screen, with Charles the Third staring deep into our eyes. We were given fantastic app recommendations and offered films and series on Amazon Prime. Various apps (like YouTube) have been preinstalled.

The home screen can also be extensively personalised. For instance, you can customise channels and rearrange apps and games. As with other apps from the Google Play Store, Netflix can be installed on the device but isn’t supported natively.

Well, at least Xgimi has provided information on how to get Netflix running on the projector. We were finally able to select our own sources by going to the top right corner on the menu bar. The main thing we had wanted to try out the entire time was our laptop connected to the Horizon Pro via HDMI.

A word about Google Assistant: Once it is turned on in the settings, you can activate it by pressing the extra button on the remote control. There is a microphone on the front of the remote for you to give voice commands easily. This feature also works well in YouTube; the Assistant provided decent video recommendations based on our search requests.

The projector starts to perform auto keystone correction every time it boots up. This process reliably fixes any image distortions caused by non-optimal positioning of the device without requiring users to do anything. It is even able to detect obstacles and avoid them.

Once the correction is complete, users will have the option to fine-tune it by hand. You’ll also find an auto focus option in the menu – a blessing for anyone who has ever tried to manually adjust the focus on projectors such as the Casiris A6 . The auto focus feature works exceptionally well on the Horizon Pro, and you can even manually focus the projected image using the remote control.

However, the auto distortion correction does come with a minor downside. There are visible hard-to-ignore edges surrounding the projected image. Nevertheless, the most important thing about a projector is still its image quality, and 4K images produced by the Horizon pro are outstanding.

Thanks to the excellent auto focus, images look even crisper than those from the Casiris A6 UST projector . Whilst we previously criticised the non-Pro model for its somewhat washed-out details, the 4K image from the Horizon Pro is razor-sharp with colours that truly pop. We think the image looks fantastic as a whole Because the Horizon Pro’s can get fairly bright, the projected image is still easily readable in daylight but looks substantially less contrasty and vibrant.

The pictures below were captured with the same ISO, aperture and shutter speed to illustrate the difference between how the same image looks in daylight and in a darkened room. However, they are not necessarily representative of the product’s image quality. The photos ended up looking slightly too dark, for example.

Xgimi claims that the product is capable of 110% DCI-P3 coverage, but the device only managed to reproduce 71% of DCI-P3 (and 88% of sRGB) when we tested it together with our screen and laptop as the source. In the default settings, there is perceptible input lag when the projector is connected to a laptop via HDMI. We noticed a considerable latency as soon as we started moving the mouse cursor.

However, Xgimi advertises on the product page that the Horizon Pro has a super low latency of “just” 35 ms. The secret here is MEMC: this technology estimates and inserts a picture between two frames, for example, to make motion appear smoother. As a result, a 24 fps video will look more like 50 to 60 fps and feel much silkier.

This isn’t an issue when you’re watching films and can have a positive impact depending on your visual preferences. For games, though, the computation between frames causes the aforementioned latency. Fortunately, there are two ways to turn off this feature, both of which are accessible via Image Mode in the settings.

We recommend switching from Default to Game. Alternatively, you can go over to Custom mode, where you can also fine-tune a few other settings and find MEMC tucked away in the Motion Compensation option at the very bottom. You should definitely disable it when gaming because doing so will indeed reduce lag to a hardly noticeable level and also make games very playable.

That said, advanced gamers may still be able to detect a tiny amount of lag in very fast-paced shooters. Unlike the reviewer who looked at the non-Pro model, we didn’t see any obvious halo effect with the Horizon Pro in its default settings, especially when looking at white fonts on a black background. Technology has progressed over the past few years in terms of projector noise.

Whilst old halogen lamp projectors are relatively loud by comparison, LED and laser projectors run slightly quieter. During our testing, we could hear the product’s fans spinning very steadily. They are pointed towards the exhaust vents and ran at a fairly quiet 26 dB, measured from 1 m (or about 3.

3 ft) away. When watching videos or playing games, you’ll quickly forget about the rather quiet whispering or not notice it much. On average, the projector consumes 0.

5 watts of power even when switched off. Based on our measurement, the average power usage remains pretty constant at roughly 128 watts when the device is in use – pretty much regardless of how bright the projected scene is. We’ll be honest: the Xgimi Horizon Pro eventually won us over and made us forget our initial frustration.

Whilst this is largely thanks to the sharp and vibrant 4K image that the device is capable of outputting, the many useful and convenient automatic features (e. g. auto keystone correction and auto focus) also played a part here.

You won’t need to adjust anything manually if you don’t wish to. We were really annoyed by the device requiring an Internet connection at the start, especially since it refused to connect to our Wi-Fi. It is obvious that everything is designed around apps, Google and Android.

But the Horizon Pro works very well after the initial setup. The Xgimi Horizon Pro is a bright, quiet and, most crucially, convenient 4K projector with a host of auto functions. It can deliver sharp and vibrant image and even be used for gaming.

But you’ll have to live with its Internet access requirements. For its current price of under €1,499 (US$1,499), you are getting a highly capable and quiet 4K projector for your home theatre. .