Daytime Performance

To evaluate the projector we are using the Grandview Dynamique DY3 100" ALR screen, which provides a 140° viewing angle and gain of 0.4. It is set in a living room with natural sunlight from the left and ceiling lighting from the right.


During the day, at around 11 AM on a cloudy, late morning we fired up our favorite movie trailer that actually made it to the theaters - Top Gun Maverick. The colors on the initial images seemed fine, but the saturation felt overly muted. It simply did not fit what we would expect to see, especially using an ALR screen. At the hangar scene it was quite apparent, as the crowd in the foreground was not visible for the most part.


A little sluicing in the display settings which you can access directly by press the appropriate button on the remote, we noticed that HDR was enabled. This tends to drop brightness in favor to pronounce black deeper and allow color to pop a bit more. once we tuned this off, the visual issues were fixed. We also took the opportunity to turn off MEMC - motion compensation - as there were still a few artifacts on fast moving scenes. This was something we noticed on the Horizon Pro as well and has not been resolved yet unfortunately. That said, subjectively speaking, the issues did not look as pronounced with the software version on this Horizon unit.


Now back to our regularly scheduled programming, the famous "They're called orders, Maverick" scene does reveal the chair in the background somewhat, but the human on the flight is just so faintly visible. Bright scenes are excellent and the color balance feels great with no hues jumping out over others. Overall the overall daytime viewing experience is great once you turn off HDR. There is nothing inherently wrong with the HDR function, but it simply pushes the XGIMI Horizon below that brightness threshold needed to have an awesome experience during the day.


Both cartoons and the obligatory Death Stranding opening scenes do perfectly fine with bright colors on the limited palette for the animation and clearly visible skies in the game environment. Even at 1080p and 100" diameter, there was never a sense of eyes finding square pixels to focus on either.