Daytime Use

With its advertised 2200 ANSI lumens, the Horizon line is not only the brightest projector family from XGIMI, but also nearly twice as bright as the H2 (1350 ANSI lumens) and magnitudes brighter than the Halo at 800 or MoGo Pro+ at 300 ANSI lumens. For a 4K projector in the $1600 price range, the Horizon Pro manages to hold its own against other DLP units of that price bracket. Naturally, you won't be able to match the 5000–7000 ANSI lumens of (ultra) short throw laser based projectors, but keep in mind that those also tend to cost three times as much as the Horizon Pro.

With its brightness, we put the XGIMI Horizon Pro through the worst-possible scenario: next to a large balcony window in the early afternoon with nearly direct sunlight. In this setting, even the LED TV sometimes lacked the chops to outshine its surroundings. Thus, it is not surprising that the Horizon Pro is not quite able to match that luminosity either, but it still allows the user to easily navigate around and use the device. The Android TV interface is all standard, and thanks to it being version 10, there are no ads to be found. As soon as you open the YouTube app on both Google TV and the Horizon Pro, there no longer are any visual differences, either.

As you might have guessed, we are using Top Gun Maverick in 4K as a first video to get some initial impressions. On that note, it should be mentioned that the 55" LG TV only supports 1080p, which provides a nice visual contrast to the benefits of 4K.


In these surroundings, the XGIMI Horizon Pro manages to fight off some of the issues we had when playing this video on the much dimmer MoGo Pro+. Black parts of the trailer convey a little bit more information instead of just being a black blob, and bright areas like the sky offer higher luminance. The 4K picture quality is excellent, but while motion compensation was excellent in providing a smoother image as well, there were noticeable artifacts in fast-moving scenes beyond the smallest "weak" setting. The HDR and illumination enhancing features, on the other hand, worked well, so we left those on.


Adjusting the scenario slightly the next day, once again with clear skies and sunlight, the XGIMI Horizon Pro was situated on a tripod to the right of the couch area in the living room, with its screen projecting unto the area above where the 55" TV was previously located. Both keystone correction and object detection worked well even at this fairly extreme angle to make the most of the available space. The large lamp was avoided nicely, and while you could see the original, skewed shape ever so gently illuminated around the keystone-adjusted image, watching a live soccer match streamed to the Horizon Pro resulted in a great experience even with fairly bright surroundings. At this point, the image projected unto the wall was roughly 110" diagonally. While XGIMI mentions the possibility of up to 300" with the Horizon Pro, that will only truly be viable in a pitch black scenario. In reality, you probably want to settle for at most 150" for the best balance between size and luminance. Look closely and you will notice a bit of illumination loss as you move towards the far left edge of the screen, as the roughly 35 degree angle of projection takes its toll.


The third scenario in similarly lit surroundings the next day consisted of placing the XGIMI Horizon Pro on the coffee table in front of the seating area and projecting a nearly 90" image straight unto the wall with a minimal amount of keystone correction. Launching Amazon Prime Video, you can still easily make out all the menu items and various thumbnails. So we launched Tomorrow War and fast-forwarded to a scene with both dark and light elements alongside a fair amount of detail across the screen. As you can see, even in the afternoon sun, many details, like pipes, can be seen in the darker area, with only the darkest bottom-left corner loosing some details due to the lack of illumination. Looking at Chris Pratt's "serious face," the same holds true, with illumination not managing to light up shadows on his cheeks well against the sunlight. That said, all of this is to be expected in such a scenario.

When playing 4K content, we also played with the motion compensation settings, but always kept getting some small, random artifacts; thus, we turned it off and stuck with the default 60 Hz the Horizon Pro provides.


Next, to give Apple TV some love, we fired up a trailer of Ted Lasso Season 2. This lighthearted, optimistic comedy sports bright colors and mostly day-time surroundings. As you can see in the first shot, the shadow behind the door is still illuminated gently, while the wide, overhead shot of the stadium really manages to come out well as it lacks extremely light and dark elements. Lastly, the characters in their blue and red uniforms and dimmer faces and elements in the background come up in vivid detail, though once again, the dugout cover is too dark to make out much more than a faint glow.


For all cartoon fans out there, we picked a scene from Rick and Morty. The simple color palette including bright colors had no issues with the daylight setting and managed to pop on the projected surface. As most cartoons and animations rely on a limited number of colors along with well-lit settings and scenes, this type of media will come across as vivid and sharp in even less favorable surroundings. Interestingly enough, motion compensation seems to work better with such video content.