Setup and Performance

The first time you power on the projector, you are greeted by some soothing music at ~50% volume and a very bright projection. I tried it during the day first, which in hindsight was not the best move in my living room that has two huge windows. But even so, I could easily see what was going on. Closing the curtains or waiting for the sun to go down makes more sense for all projectors, and I will say that the increased luminance compared to the MoGo Pro+ already makes this a winner compared to the other one. Indeed, you get a peak of 800 lumens with AC power and 600 lumens on the battery. The very first thing the XGIMI Halo does after auto-focusing and automatic keystone correction is to project an image of the remote control with the information to hold two buttons to pair it with the projector. So yeah, get two AAA batteries since you can't do anything without the remote and XGIMI does not include any. I have taken the image above at -1 eV on my camera to better reflect how it looks in real life while also retaining how the boundaries of the projection look on my wall.


Setup involves a lot of steps, some of which are seen in the GIF above. The projector is treated like an Android TV system, so having and Android phone makes this a breeze in terms of connecting to your WiFi and account if you wish to make the most of it. I did just that, and then tried the "Skip" option later after a reset, which obviously makes you manually enter your WiFi credentials or even skip this entirely to use the XGIMI Halo purely as a non-smart projector. Adopting the simplest way also means you can use Google Assistant as already set up with your account, and that the device now has access to some of your account details.


Once done, the home page appears, and having used Android TV systems in the past, it was quite familiar to me. It is an excellent OS for smart content consumption, and paired with Google Assistant, the remote control enhances the user experience. During the setup process, you get the choice to install other apps. Obviously, I chose Plex, which worked flawlessly, and Netflix, which did not. I immediately got a pop-up message stating that the device is not optimized for Netflix, but then saw that a system update was available, so maybe that was it? Updating took a couple of minutes as it involved downloading and installing a ~710 MB file, and here we see some of the shortcomings due to the smaller entity that XGIMI is. There is a minor language barrier to hop over, but also some leftover code syntax in the changelog, which does not look great for the user-friendly consumer product the Halo otherwise is. The system update obviously did nothing for Netflix even though Netflix clearly loads in the background quite smoothly. This was quite annoying, so I contacted the company to see what was going on after reading online that I was not the only one with this issue. Below is their official statement—take it for what you will.

"XGIMI is one of the few projector brands that have been licensed to access official Android TV, having such an OS installed directly in our projectors give us control of software updates, for a better user experience while using thousands of applications and streaming services supported by Android TV such as Youtube,Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+,HBO etc. Having said that, Netflix is not supported on all Android TV OS powered devices unless the brand is approved separately by the streaming service. This is due to the proprietary Open Connect delivery network Netflix uses to exchange traffic directly with ISPs to optimize the distribution of video content. XGIMI's mission is to deliver the best user experience at all times. We are actively in conversations with NETFLIX to integrate and run the streaming service directly and locally in our projectors, currently we recommend Netflix users to use one of the many Streaming Media Players like Amazon Firestick, RoKu, Apple TV among others, that support Netflix for a better experience."


There is a shortcut settings button on the remote control, which brings up some quick settings as well as an option to go to the full settings page, which can also be accessed through the main menu, of course. You have all the required options here, including zoom should the throw ratio of 1.2:1 not work out for you. I had the projector far enough out for a huge 120" screen, and it was at this point I was able to pixel peep quite easily to be honest. A native resolution of 1920x1080 is great for most people, especially in this projector class, but just made me want to have the 4K projector option XGIMI is bringing out.



Speaking of keystone correction, the automatic process does a very good job already. However, you may want to play around with the manual option if you have a large projection. That said, anything under ~90" had no problem with the built-in correction process. Indeed, XGIMI has +/- 40° correction both vertically and horizontally, but no one is going to run into these limits in a reasonable space. Do keep in mind that anything over ~15° of correction will result in lower ANSI luminance. I did try a few things more in line with how I have used projectors before, including on the floor, at a haphazard angle on an uneven surface, and on a conference room desk slightly angled away horizontally, and it all worked great. If anything, the shorter throw ratio can be a bit of an issue in some professional environments built around old-school 2:1 or worse throw ratio projectors, and you may end up fiddling around with the XGIMI Halo to make sure the projection fits the screen.


What will save time for most people is the excellent auto-focus on the XGIMI Halo, with 10,000 points used by the auto-focus camera on the front to quickly do the job based on differential contrast. It worked fine on a white wall, even during the day. Manual focus did not get me anything worthwhile compared to auto mode either.


Using the XGIMI Halo was definitely more pleasure than pain, which might be the first time I have ever said that about a projector. After a while, the system defaults to some preset screen saver images, and there is no perceived lag when switching between apps. If the 2 GB RAM gets overwhelmed somehow, you can clear apps, which also clears memory. I had multiple apps running in the background in Android TV OS without issue, and keep in mind that the native resolution is 1080p in a 16:9 aspect ratio, so 21:9 content, such as movies, ends up having some backlighting above and below.

Using the projector as a monitor paired to a laptop is another popular use case, and there is actually an option to feed the projector 4K content since the HDMI port is actually HDMI 2.0. It ultimately gets downsampled to 1080p by the projector, however, so it's no different from playing 4K YouTube content on a 1080p monitor, for example. Gaming is.. doable.. with ~30 ms of input lag. It's actually great to play something like Civilization 6 on a huge screen, as well as single-player games for fun at home. The projector screen/background is going to be important for making out differences with in-game text, even more so than with movies, etc., you can get quite immersed in. Do note that at the highest brightness setting, some colors can get saturated, so you may well have to turn the brightness down for the best color accuracy. Do it more in battery mode coupled with keystone correction at a steep angle and you are down to under 300 lumens, where things just get washed out.

Remember that soothing music at 50% volume from before? 50% volume was already enough to fill my relatively large living room, and turning the volume all the way up actually was louder than I thought. Indeed, XGIMI claims another use case of the Halo is simply as a speaker for music and podcasts, and the dual 5 W Harman Kardon speakers do a commendable job in getting loud while retaining detail throughout. It's not going to beat any halfway decent speaker system or even an entry-level soundbar, but this is another case of the increased bulk compared to the MoGo Pro+ being put to good use. For those wondering, the internal fan is quiet; you barely notice it at all even when nearby. I will also mention that the XGIMI Halo is compatible with DLP-link 3D glasses for 3D projection, but I was unfortunately not able to test this out as I have none here.


Battery life is just fine, with about three hours of video and audio playback at about 75% brightness and 60% volume on average. Using it purely as a music player with the screen off increases battery life to 4.5–5 hours. The projector, again via Android TV, brings up a 10 second reminder of powering off even if you shut it down manually. Once done, it takes about two hours to charge the projector, but you can of course use it while charging. As such, it has enough of a battery charge to play a movie or two if outdoors or in a power outage. Fill up the 16 GB of storage with emergency material thus, and use the other options for general use.