Hisense C2 Ultra review

Whether you’re after an eye-catchingly designed projector ‘cube', an ultra-short-throw projector you can leave on a sideboard, a serious home theatre projector or a design-led ultra-portable model, Hisense has got you covered.

In fact, as the many strong reviews the brand has received from us in recent years prove, Hisense hasn’t just got most of your potential projector needs covered; it’s got them nailed.

Not surprisingly, then, we have high hopes for the brand’s C2 Ultra model – despite its obvious focus on design and convenience.

Price

Value is usually a strong area for Hisense, and the C2 Ultra is no exception. Its £1799 / $2300 / AU$3495 pricing is aggressively low (particularly in the UK) for a projector that provides such specifications as 4K support, triple laser lighting, an integrated smart system, Dolby Vision support and 3000 lumens of peak brightness to go with its eye-catching lifestyle design.

There is some stiff competition around this projector's price, though, including BenQ’s Award-winning W2720i home theatre projector or, if you want something that maintains the C2 Ultra’s more portable, lifestyle design approach, BenQ’s TK705i or Epson’s significantly cheaper EF-72.

Design

The C2 Ultra’s compact (29 x 25 x 25cm) form employs one of the ‘cradle’ designs that have become all the rage these days, where the projector rests within a pair of support arms that allow the main body to tilt up or down to help you to get images to the right height on your wall/screen.

The projector also rotates around on its circular base to easily adapt to any tricky angles your room might present you with, and that base rather niftily carries a fairly large up-firing speaker on its top edge.

The C2 Ultra is finished in an appealing gunmetal grey colour, and boasts a neat combination of smooth matte, high gloss and grilled finishes over various parts of the main projector body’s ‘slightly squashed cube’ shape.

Unusually for a cradle-style projector, the C2 Ultra can be mounted onto an optional thin pole floorstand or ceiling mount bracket if you’re not happy just sitting it on a coffee table.

The C2 Ultra’s provided remote control features a nice finish, backlit buttons and an ergonomic layout that includes buttons for direct access to some of the world’s most popular integrated streaming apps. There’s also a mic button on offer, indicating that you can control aspects of the projector by talking to it courtesy of Hisense’s own ‘Vidaa Voice’ system or built-in Alexa support.

Features

The C2 Ultra is a 4K-capable DLP projector illuminated by a triple laser lighting system.

We should qualify the 4K claim by saying that, as ever with DLP projectors, it’s not ‘true’ 4K to the extent that it features a full 4096x2160 or 3840x2160 count of digital mirror devices on its image control chip. The combination of pixel shifting and rapid mirror ‘flashing’ created by Texas Instruments’ XPR system, though, creates a 4K effect from DLP projectors such as the C2 Ultra that’s actually been approved as genuine 4K by the influential Consumer Technology Association in the US.

The C2 Ultra’s laser lighting is rated to deliver up to 3000 lumens of brightness – a high number for such a portable projector, and one that raises the possibility of the projector genuinely holding its own against quite high levels of ambient light.

This brightness is also important to Hisense’s claims that the C2 Ultra can support images as big as 300 inches across – though because the larger you go, the more brightness you lose, we argue 100-150 inches will give you more satisfying results from an all-round image impact perspective.

Hisense also claims that the C2 Ultra can reproduce more than 100 per cent of the AV world’s most extreme BT.2020 HDR colour spectrum. Experience suggests such claims are optimistic in the real world, but Hisense quoting it at least points to a projector that is likely to deliver most if not all of the narrower DCI-P3 colour spectrum used for most of today’s HDR mastering.

The C2 Ultra’s small shape and cradled design make it a particularly portable projector, easily moved to different rooms or houses. It even ships with a neat cloth carry bag.

It builds on its portability, too, by being just about as easy a projector to set up as we’ve seen. It can rotate through a full 360 degrees on its circular base, for starters, and it supports a generous 135 degrees of vertical tilt to help you get the image in the right place.

Obviously, the sort of angles created by rotating and tilting projectors can cause distortions to the shape of the image on your wall/screen. Here again, though, Hisense has got you covered with its Auto Magic AI Adjusting 2.0 system.

Despite its awkward name, this combination of auto keystone correction, auto focus, auto obstacle avoidance, intelligent wall colour adaptation and intelligent eye protection works remarkably well and extremely consistently, contributing to a genuine plug-and-play experience that seldom needs any manual intervention to improve on its results.

The C2 Ultra even carries a 0.9-1.5:1 optical zoom system to help it adapt to a wide range of room sizes and room layouts. That’s more zoom range than you would typically expect to get with this sort of projector.

Most lifestyle projectors these days provide some sort of AI set-up system, of course. But the C2 Ultra’s system just works out of the box more straightforwardly than most.

The C2 Ultra’s connections comprise two HDMI ports (one with eARC support), an optical audio output, two USB 3.0 ports, a headphone socket, and ethernet, plus Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6e wireless connections.

The wi-fi connectivity feeds the built-in Vidaa smart platform. This isn’t as sophisticated or visually attractive as the popular Google TV system many projectors use, but it’s easy to follow and is strong on native streaming app support.

Netflix, BBC iPlayer, ITVX, All 4, My 5, Now TV, Disney+, Prime Video, YouTube, Apple TV, Paramount+, and HBO Max apps are all present, and a firmware update has now also added support in the UK for Freely, through which you can live-stream many of the UK’s terrestrial broadcast services rather than having to use a traditional aerial system.

The C2 Ultra supports HDR video, as we’d expect of pretty much any proper home entertainment projector these days, but it doesn’t stop at the usual HDR10 and HLG formats – it also supports both the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats.

Finding one of these premium HDR formats on a projector at this level is still quite rare, so finding both on the C2 Ultra is excellent. Basically, it means the C2 Ultra will always play the best version of any source you present it with.

The playback flexibility doesn’t end there, either. The C2 Ultra has also earned IMAX Enhanced certification, and carries an IMAX Enhanced picture preset, while Hisense’s other usual punchy HDR Standard and HDR Day picture presets are also joined by a Filmmaker Mode calibrated to try and deliver pictures that get as close as the projector can manage to current mastering standards, for that ‘as the director intended’ feel.

There’s also support for 3D if you sort yourself out with a pair of DLP-Link 3D glasses, and an official ‘Designed For Xbox’ badge in the C2 Ultra’s marketing points to some unusually advanced gaming support. Confirmed features include ALLM switching when gaming sources are detected, 240Hz refresh rate support, and a measured 34.4ms of input lag in Game mode with a 60Hz signal.

You can get this down to 17.6ms if you call in a DLP Turbo Mode option, at the expense of some of the projector’s auto image correction tools.

A dedicated Gaming menu and information screen comes up if you hit the menu button with a game source running into the projector, and hooking up an Xbox Series X confirms 4K/120Hz support with HDR and VRR. Excellent.

One last feature in the C2 Ultra’s impressive feature locker for its money is a JBL-designed/tuned 40W sound system comprising 2 x 10W amplification and a 20W bass speaker cleverly built into the projector’s chunky circular desktop base.

Hisense’s materials on the projector suggest this sound system only supports DTS Virtual:X 3D audio, but Dolby Atmos also plays fine during our tests. Quite a lot better than ‘fine’, actually, but we’ll come back to that later.

Picture quality

As well as being fantastically easy to set up, the Hisense C2 Ultra’s pictures are effortlessly watchable. Hisense appears to have been doing living room projectors for long enough now to have forged a great feel for the sort of picture elements that most immediately warm viewers to a particular model’s cause.

The C2 Ultra’s HDR images are bright, for starters, making full use of the available 3000 lumens to deliver images that look both excellently punchy in a dark environment, and strong enough to hold their own, retaining good colour saturation and solidity, even in fairly bright living room conditions.

The C2 Ultra is even able to deliver bright highlights of HDR images with enough potency to almost have you believing it must be using a local dimming system somehow – even though this is, of course, not something current home projection technology can do.

Pictures are sharp and clean enough to look and feel like real 4K too, and the sharpness holds up well when there’s motion in the frame. Judder levels with 24p movie content feel strikingly natural rather than exaggerated or inconsistent.

Colour tones look nicely balanced and full of subtlety, too, helping 4K images deliver that three-dimensional feel that’s only fully unlocked by displays that are capable of a good combination of colour blending, contrast and clean, natural motion.

Black levels are only respectable rather than great, but for much of the time this relatively average part of the C2 Ultra’s performance is ‘hidden’ by the intensity and brightness of the rest of the images. It’s only uniformly dark scenes that suddenly reveal quite a cloak of greyness hanging over proceedings – especially if you’re using the projector’s Dolby Vision Bright, HDR Day or HDR Standard settings. You can also sometimes see a bit more detail in these elevated black areas than the content creators really intended you to.

The Dolby Vision Dark and HDR10 Filmmaker Modes improve on the excessive detail flaw without taking things so far that subtle details start to be crushed out of the image, but these modes are significantly less punchy than their brighter siblings, and the level of greyness lying over proceedings feels more or less the same. It’s just not offset by as much brightness as you get in the lighter HDR presets.

We also spot moderate levels of DLP projection’s rainbow effect over stand-out bright highlights, and while colours look well balanced, they can start to look slightly pallid in the brightest HDR images when using the projector’s relatively bright settings.

The brightest modes can also reduce the 3D effect that’s such a strong attraction with the Dolby Vision Dark and Filmmaker Mode settings.

Unless, however, you’re particularly susceptible to seeing the DLP projector rainbow effect (which a few people are), there’s nothing wrong enough or limited enough about the C2 Ultra’s pictures to prevent it from being consistently great fun to watch by class standards.

Yes, it sacrifices a little insight in the darkest and brightest scenes in its mostly highly successful quest to deliver as easy an ‘out of the box’ experience as we’ve come across in the projector world. But the overall picture results are still seriously easy on the eye for a projector that also has so many features and so much flexibility to offer.

Sound quality

The C2 Ultra’s clever integration of an unusually powerful three-speaker sound system pays off brilliantly. The volume and depth of bass delivered by that large up-firing woofer built into the projector’s base, for starters, are remarkable for such an affordable projector. It’s able to vary both the frequency response and volume of the bass it puts out better than the vast majority of TVs and pretty much all projectors, too.

The C2 Ultra builds on its strong bass foundations with similarly remarkable amounts of power and expressiveness for its midrange, too. It can get seriously loud without becoming muddy or congested, combining its raw power with strong levels of detail, without anything sounding too bright, clipped, thin or harsh.

The C2 Ultra even manages to deliver a palpable sense of three-dimensionality to its Dolby Atmos presentation, casting a soundstage that has genuine depth, height and width – and into which effects and scores are placed with excellent precision and dynamism.

As the cherry on the cake, the C2 Ultra not only delivers voices with a lovely rounded quality and great sense of context, but also ensures they’re projected, along with much of the rest of the sound, towards your screen, so that dialogue doesn’t sound as disconnected from the onscreen action as projector sound usually does.

The only problem with the C2 Ultra’s sound is that, while its woofer works brilliantly for the vast majority of the time, it can get caught out by the movie world’s most extreme and sustained low-frequency moments, suddenly succumbing to quite distracting amounts of crackling, whooping and phutting. It helps at such moments if you haven’t got the volume set much higher than its 60 level, but there’s no way of completely avoiding the occasional bass kerfuffle.

It’s also worth mentioning that even at its best, the integrated sound system isn’t a patch on the sound you would get from a decent soundbar, let alone a dedicated home cinema set-up, but that’s to be expected.

Verdict

The C2 Ultra isn’t perfect, but no lifestyle projector packed with so much flexibility and so many features at this price was ever going to be.

Even so, its rather grey dark scenes and rainbow effect issues cost it a mark in the context of the improved picture quality you can get from one or two less flexible rivals – especially the BenQ W2720i.

If its flexibility and features – especially its strong gaming support – sound like just what you need, though, you’ll likely be pretty amazed that such a user-friendly projector can also perform so well.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 5
• Features 5

MORE:

Read our review of the BenQ W2720i

Also consider the BenQ TK705i

Best projectors: the best options tested by our home cinema experts