Hisense PT1 review

It’s easy to see why ultra short throw projectors have become so popular in recent years.

They can deliver bigger images and usually cost much less than the largest TVs, and do so while sat just inches from your screen, rather than having to squat in the middle of your living room.

It’s also easy to see why Hisense UST projectors in particular have done so well.

Hisense has more experience with them than most brands, which now typically pays off in superior performance levels, and it has the economies of scale to sell UST projectors more cheaply than most rivals.

Even by Hisense’s standards, though, the PT1 is quite the head turner, offering full tri-chroma (RGB) laser projection, built-in Vidaa smarts, a premium design and a potent integrated sound system for just £1599 in the UK.

Is this really Hisense’s biggest bargain to date, though, or does the price come with strings attached?

Price

The Hisense PT1’s £1599 / $2199 / AU$2500 price is aggressive for any UST projector, never mind one as well specified and richly featured as this one.

If your projector doesn’t need to be a UST model, Hisense has a strong ‘coffee table’ offering in the shape of the C2 Ultra, while BenQ’s Award-winning W2720i is a strong rival if you’re after a projector focused more on a dedicated home theatre approach.

Design

The PT1 doesn't stray too far from the conventional rectangular UST projector design, with speakers on the front edge and a lens slit on top. That's quite a contrast to models such as the futuristic AWOL Vision Aetherion Max and gleaming metallic Leica Cine 1.

It offers enough eye-catching refinement in its build quality and the crisp bronze metallic trim and side detailing, though, to look like it should cost more than it does.

Hisense’s love affair with UST projectors started with the notion that when partnered with a screen they could essentially replace the traditional TV set, so it’s no great surprise to find the PT1 shipping with pretty much the same long, sleekly finished and button-packed remote control you get with the brand’s latest premium TVs. It even has the same solar recharging panel at the bottom of its front edge, and a series of buttons for directly accessing various streaming apps.

Features

As a UST projector, the PT1 is capable of producing images as large as 150 inches when sat just inches from your wall. However, thanks to a slightly restrained claimed peak brightness of 2500 lumens (less than you get with Hisense’s cheaper PL2 UST model), you’re probably better off thinking of 120 inches or so as being the maximum image size this projector can stretch to while retaining the sort of punchy images you’ll likely want in today’s HDR world.

Talking of HDR, the PT1 joins other current Hisense laser projectors in supporting all four of the main HDR formats: HLG, HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Such comprehensive HDR support remains uncommon in the projector world, and it means the PT1 will always play the best version of any HDR content you feed it. It’s able to apply dynamic tone mapping to HDR10 content, too, in a bid to optimise such images to the projector’s capabilities.

The PT1 is capable of playing 4K images through its 2.07 million micro mirror DLP optical engine courtesy of Texas Instruments' XPR technology (a combination of pixel shifting and fast DLP mirror ‘flashing’), and its light comes from three separate lasers, one for each of the red, green and blue colour elements.

This is the most important way it differs from the cheaper PL2 model, which only uses single-element laser lighting, and it should enable the PT1 to produce a much wider colour range.

In fact, Hisense claims it can reproduce 110 per cent of the AV world’s most extreme (and actually rarely used) BT.2020 spectrum, making full coverage of the smaller DCI-P3 spectrum typically used in HDR mastering well within its reach.

The PT1 also carries an AI Colour mode that claims to fine-tune every frame to deliver, in Hisense’s words, “richer, more accurate colours that go beyond what typical displays can offer”.

The PT1's built-in smart system is the ninth generation of Hisense’s own Vidaa platform. While Vidaa might not be the most glamorous or ‘intelligent’ smart system on the market, it is straightforwardly organised and presented, making it relatively easy to use.

It also carries all the main global and UK apps, including the relatively new Freely UK platform that lets you livestream most of the UK’s terrestrial broadcaster channels rather than having to depend on an aerial to receive them. This is particularly handy given that the PT1 no longer sports the digital tuner input you used to get on Hisense’s earliest laser TV projectors.

Connections are still decent, though. They include three HDMI ports (two with ‘enhanced’ HDMI 2.1 gaming features), a USB-C port, an optical digital audio output, a headphone jack and a LAN port. There's also wi-fi and Bluetooth support, including Apple AirPlay.

Home theatre fans will be pleased to hear that the PT1’s available picture presets include both Filmmaker and IMAX Enhanced modes, while gamers will appreciate the projector’s support for 240Hz frame rates (at HD resolution), 4K resolution at 120Hz refresh rates, ALLM switching, and a reasonably speedy (for a projector) measured input lag of 37.1ms with 60Hz feeds in the default Game mode.

This input lag can be reduced, too, to 20.4ms if you activate the DLP Turbo feature in the picture menus. Activating DLP Turbo, though, switches off all your auto and manual keystone correction work – not ideal for us given the unexpected difficulties we experienced with getting the PT1’s provided auto keystone correction feature to get the edges of the images straight.

The relatively deep and substantial bodywork associated with UST projectors often helps them integrate substantial sound systems, and the PT1 sports an unusual 2.0.2 channel arrangement, where the two main front-firing speakers are partnered with a pair of up-firing units. Total amplification is 46 watts.

Picture quality

If you’re careful which settings you use, the PT1 is capable of delivering plenty of the impressively natural, balanced and refined pictures we’ve come to expect from Hisense UST projectors.

Provided you use its Filmmaker Mode or IMAX Enhanced presets with HDR10 footage, and the Dark Dolby Vision setting with Dolby Vision content, images enjoy a wonderfully no-nonsense and essentially glitch-free quality.

This is expertly built on a combination of remarkably deep and consistent blacks for such an affordable UST projector. There is excellent sharpness and texturing with both native 4K and upscaled HD sources; and eye-catchingly natural skin tones of the sort that elude so many other similarly affordable projectors.

Motion with 24p movie sources looks natural out of the box in the presets we’ve just recommended too, without the need to mess around with any motion compensation settings.

Both the Filmmaker Mode and IMAX Enhanced presets default to the Film option for the PT1’s Ultra Smooth Motion setting, confirming the sense we’ve got from other recent Hisense projectors that this Film setting is now one of the most cinematic movie motion presets in the projector world.

However, while the Filmmaker Mode, IMAX Enhanced and Dolby Vision Dark modes are endlessly watchable in pretty much fully blacked out rooms, they look a little dim and dull in any even half-bright living room environment.

This doesn’t matter, of course, if you’re looking for a projector to go into a dedicated home cinema room, but UST projectors such as the PT1 are typically positioned as lifestyle options, designed to cope with bright as well as dark room settings. So, while the PT1’s lack of brightness versus most UST projectors might actually serve its pictures well when it comes to their excellent black levels, they become a limitation if you’re looking for a UST projector to essentially take the place of a living room television. Don’t forget, either, that if you try to push the PT1’s pictures towards the biggest extremes of its claimed screen size range, the picture will shed significantly more brightness.

It’s perhaps telling that if you go into the PT1’s Screen Type menu, the only options available are Wide Angle ALR screen, High Gain ALR Screen 1, High Gain ALR Screen 2, and No Screen. There’s no option for a relatively neutral or negative gain screen of the sort a home cinema purist might prefer to use, perhaps acknowledging that the PT1’s limited brightness needs extra ‘help’ from whatever surface it’s being projected onto.

We were able to confirm that the PT1’s most accurate image modes do indeed benefit from a brightness boost when projected onto the 120-inch AWOL Vision Cinematic+ ALR Motorised floor-rising acoustic screen. However, the screen’s relatively high gain made dark scenes look a little less convincing in a dark room than they did on our usual almost-neutral-gain screen.

It also adds to the overall cost of the projector set-up, of course, as a good-quality ALR (Ambient Light Reflecting) screen is considerably more expensive than a regular neutral-gain screen.

Naturally, the PT1 has picture settings that can push the picture quite significantly harder in terms of brightness and colour saturation than the relatively accurate modes we’ve recommended so far. Using the HDR Standard, HDR Dynamic or, to a lesser extent, Dolby Vision Bright modes, however, has a really quite strange impact on the projector’s colour performance, with the tones that generally looked so balanced and authentic in Filmmaker Mode especially suddenly starting to take on some quite ‘off’ tones.

A kind of bluish green hue tends to dominate the overall tone of the HDR Standard setting, while skin sometimes takes on the sort of tones you only see in the real world with people who’ve spent way too long on a sun bed.

For example, the leaden skies over Los Angeles as Agent K heads to the old orphanage in Blade Runner 2049 take on a curious purple hue at times, and what should be subtle tonal differences become overstated, drawing too much attention to themselves by simply not looking subtle or authentic enough.

The brighter settings do create a more HDR feeling with HDR sources, including giving peak bright highlights impressive punch for a display technology that doesn’t have any local dimming processing to draw on. The overcooked nature of some of the colour tones is reduced a little by the natural desaturating effect of ambient light, too, if you’re in a non-blacked-out space.

Overall, though, we don’t find the Standard and Dynamic HDR10 settings and Dolby Vision Bright modes as truly engaging and immersive as we would have liked while using the projector in day-to-day living room conditions.

The PT1’s brighter presets also cause an increase in the rainbow effect, where the DLP projector engine causes stripes of pure red, green and blue to flit over stand-out bright objects, though it is far from the worst offender we’ve seen in this respect.

Sound quality

You certainly can’t accuse the PT1 of not trying to deliver a compelling audio performance to go with its king-sized pictures. In fact, if anything, it tries a bit too hard.

At first hearing, you’re immediately impressed by two striking audio achievements: loudness and the size of the soundstage. The speakers mounted on the projector’s front edge drive their sound forward with impressive power and volume, easily filling the gap between the projector and seating position with a potently expressed three-dimensional space.

The smaller up-firing speakers built into the PT1’s top are a little less well-rounded, but they deliver a palpable sense of height and plenty of subtle placement details within the resulting vertical wall of sound. Cooling fan noise, meanwhile, is noticeable by its absence, even during the quietest movie scenes.

Lower mid-range sounds are rich and rounded, too. The projector can even deliver enough bass to give big movie moments a level of heft and scale not found on most integrated TV and projector sound systems.

The only problem is that this bass doesn’t know when to stop, sometimes trying so enthusiastically to reproduce the movie world’s most foundation-troubling low-frequency sounds that the speakers either collapse in on themselves, so that the overall sound becomes swallowed and muted, or succumb to distracting crackles and buzzes.

Deep male voices can sound a bit thick and dominant, too, though we can finish on the good note the audio mostly deserves by adding that voices sound connected with the action on the screen, rather than as if they’re coming from the speakers below.

Verdict

The Hisense PT1 is yet another highly competent projector from Hisense. In its most accurate, dark room-friendly picture settings, in fact, it’s rather more than competent, delivering excellent images for its money, with outstanding black levels and natural colours.

Its relative lack of brightness compared with many of today’s UST projectors, though, together with some colour issues when using its brightest picture settings, make the PT1 less of a dark room/bright room all-rounder than people looking for the convenience of a UST projector might want it to be.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Hisense C2 Ultra

Also consider the BenQ W2720i

Read our Hisense PL2 review

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