Hisense XR10 review

Hisense has clearly decided that it’s time to capitalise on its huge success in the lifestyle projector world by launching a shiny, new no-holds-barred flagship model.

Boasting 6000 lumens of brightness, a triple laser lighting system, liquid cooling, a built-in Devialet sound system, an all-glass lens and support for every HDR format in town, the XR10 certainly makes all the right flagship noises.

But can Hisense marshal all these expensive pieces into a class-leading performance?

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Price

With Hisense usually found successfully plying its trade in the mid-range lifestyle projector arena, the £5999 / $6000 / AU$9995 price of the XR10 really is a major step up for the brand.

In fact, it will doubtless be a step too far for many home cinema-loving households, and even raises the question of whether a projector that seems from the outside at least to have been designed more as a ‘lifestyle’ model than a serious home theatre machine really makes sense at such a price.

As we’re about to explain, though, we think the XR10 makes all kinds of sense, even at its very high price.

Design

The XR10’s design is nuts in all the best ways. For starters, it ships in a beautifully designed, built-to-measure real leather carry case complete with wheels and an extendable handle that looks like Hisense thinks you’re going to love the projector so much you’ll want to take it on holiday with you.

The projector’s spectacular bodywork, meanwhile, is actually transparent in some places, so that you can marvel at some of the cool things going on under the projector’s hood.

A huge lens aperture sits within a bold bronze-coloured metallic square on one side of the projector’s front, while the left side houses two vertical stripes, one recessed, one not, housing sensors that the projector can use to help it deliver a more effective automatic set-up system.

The projector’s left, right and top edges are finished in the same bronzy colour as the area around the lens housing, while the projector’s shape resembles a larger (and much heavier) version of the sort of roughly cubic designs we’ve started to see dominating the living room projector market in recent times.

The top plate sports a beautifully designed round dial-style volume adjustment, as well as a large ambient light sensor the projector can use to optimise its picture performance to different room conditions.

That volume control, along with the grilles built into the XR10’s left and right edges, reflects the fact that the XR10 carries a built-in sound system deemed powerful enough to enable the projector to be used as a standalone wireless speaker if you so desire.

The various finishes to different sides and even within the front edge of the XR10 ought, by all rights, to make its design look a bit of a mess. Actually, though, it all comes together remarkably well in a vaguely cyberpunk kind of way.

Features

The XR10 is mostly specced to kill.

Its 6000 claimed lumens of laser-delivered peak brightness is huge by serious projector standards, for starters. That’s easily enough to punch through quite a bit of ambient light if that’s what you want it to do; drive a particularly big screen (Hisense claims 300 inches); and/or potentially handle HDR sources better than most projectors can.

Brightness alone can actually be anything but a friend to projector picture quality, though, so it’s impressive to see Hisense backing this brightness up with a healthy claimed native contrast performance of 6000:1. This jumps, too, to a very impressive claimed 60,000:1 courtesy of the projector’s premium lens iris system. As ever, though, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

Hisense has gone the extra mile, too, to avoid the sort of rowdy cooling-fan noise you might normally expect to hear from a 6000-lumen projector by integrating liquid (water) cooling into the XR10’s chassis. This is the first time, we believe, that such cooling has been used in an albeit premium living room projector.

Another big justification for the XR10’s price is its use of an all-glass, 16-element lens system that Hisense claims will deliver better light transmission and temperature stability than a plastic system could, resulting in more brightness/contrast and more consistent 4K sharpness.

The colour coverage claimed for the XR10’s laser lighting/DLP optical system is huge too: up to 110 per cent of the massive BT2020 colour space. That’s well beyond the DCI-P3 colour system used for most HDR mastering.

Talking of HDR, the XR10 is one of a very rare breed in the projector world that’s capable of playing all four of the AV world’s main HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. It’s even received IMAX Enhanced certification, meaning it has been deemed capable of doing justice to the special IMAX mastering system (which focuses on creating a noiseless look to the image). Basically, the XR10 will take in the best version of any content you feed it.

For all their advantages, setting up premium projectors can often be a pain. Hisense couldn’t have worked harder to simplify the physical aspect of set-up, though. The XR10 carries an industry-first four-8MP-camera and dual Time-of-flight (TOF) intelligent sensing set-up that it can use to correct image size, keystone and focus without you having to lift a finger. Plus, that ambient sensor we mentioned earlier can tie its readings into the calculations of a ‘Smart AI’ auto-adjustment system so that images can auto-adjust to compensate for changing room conditions.

As well as all its sensors and AI brainpower, the XR10 carries an exceptionally wide-ranging 0.84-2.0x optical zoom and bags of vertical and horizontal image shifting. It’s therefore able to (auto) adapt itself to a seriously wide range of different room sizes and layouts – and is also capable of delivering a 100-inch image from a throw distance of just 1.86m.

As we’ve come to expect from today’s lifestyle projectors, the XR10 carries a built-in smart system so that you can stream video without the need for any external sources. Rather than the Google TV system found in most projectors, though, the XR10 turns to Hisense’s own VIDAA system. This is good news, as it’s straightforward and stable to use, and it carries all of the streaming services the vast majority of households will need, including the BBC iPlayer app that’s almost always absent from Google TV systems.

The XR10 is, of course, a 4K projector. It doesn’t have a full 3840x2160 count of digital mirror devices (DMDs) that would be needed for a ‘true’ 4K experience, though. Instead, it features Texas Instruments’ XPR technology to create a 4K image from a lower DMD count using pixel-shifting. The Consumer Technology Association in the US deems the resulting images to be true 4K, though, and as we’ll see, it’s hard to disagree with that stance based on the XR10’s real-life 4K performance.

The XR10’s connections impressively comprise three HDMI ports (one 2.0, two 2.1), three USBs, an optical digital audio output, a headphone jack, an Ethernet port, and the now-expected wi-fi and Bluetooth wireless options. Apple AirPlay 2 is included in the projector’s wireless content sharing options, too.

There is one connection disappointment, though, as we couldn’t manage to get even the two HDMI 2.1 ports to handle 4K content at 120Hz from our Xbox Series X. 120Hz is possible at 1440p resolutions with the HDMI ports set to Enhance Mode Pro, but there’s no VRR support in this set-up, and nor can the projector sustain HDR gaming at any refresh rate above 60Hz.

One last premium aspect of the XR10 is its audio. Not only does it carry a 2.1 speaker system that includes a dedicated bass driver and supports DTS: Virtual X playback, but this speaker system has been tuned by acclaimed audio brand Devialet, picking up on a relationship Hisense previously forged for the speaker systems of its high-end TVs.

Picture

We’ve consistently referred to the XR10 so far as a ‘lifestyle’ or 'living room' projector, based chiefly on its appearance and convenient set-up features. It’s worth reflecting before we get into its performance, though, on the fact that Hisense describes the XR10 as being “built for cinephiles who want the big-screen theatre experience without sacrificing design, flexibility or fidelity”.

In other words, Hisense is backing the XR10 to be good enough to satisfy proper home cinema enthusiasts as well as the more casual projection market. And we’re happy to report that it’s absolutely right.

Particularly spectacular and key to its success is its ability to deliver both extreme levels of brightness and some of the deepest, most convincing blacks the HDR projection world has to offer.

Using any of the XR10’s relatively aggressive picture presets, bright HDR images are absolutely radiant, punching through even high levels of ambient light if you’re watching the projector in a regular daytime living room environment. In a dark room, meanwhile, this brightness can be used to deliver HDR with levels of intensity that we’ve only witnessed a handful of times before – mostly on ultra-high-end laser theatre projectors costing way more than the XR10.

Dark room viewing makes it obvious just how good the XR10 is with dark scenes and, even more impressively, scenes that contain a mix of light and dark elements. Provided you’re careful with the settings you use (more on this later), the XR10 can not only deliver dark imagery with much less greyness around than most, if not all, very bright, HDR-friendly projectors, but it also manages to retain all the faint shadow details you want to see if dark scenes are to feel consistent in depth with bright scenes. There’s little if any ‘black crush’ to worry about here.

Even better, the XR10 doesn’t just retain detail in the darkest image areas; it also retains excellent colour tones and saturations in such light-limited areas, avoiding the widespread tendency in both the projector and TV worlds for dark images to become desaturated.

The XR10’s colour performance is more obviously spectacular, of course, with very bright HDR images. Rather than the brightest highlights of HDR pictures starting to look thin or washed out, the XR10’s colour volume just keeps expanding as it’s fed more light.

Colour volumes push into places, in fact, that we haven’t seen before, beyond, perhaps, a couple of Xgimi models. Crucially, though, the XR10 does a substantially better job than those admittedly more affordable Xgimi rivals of making even the most vibrant colours across almost all of its picture presets look balanced and surprisingly natural. Or, at least, extremely believable.

To put it another way, while the XR10 is proud to show off what it can do, it only does so on a foundation of immersive consistency and a constant connection to the source material.

Despite the extreme vibrancy, brightness and contrast of which the XR10 is capable, as you’d hope of such an expensive and ambitious projector, it also cares about the little things in AV life. Its 4K pictures look fanatically detailed and densely textured, for instance – and this is down as much to the almost infinite subtlety of its colour rendition as it is to raw sharpness. The sharpness feels natural rather than forced or processed even in the projector’s most aggressive settings, and motion is handled without smearing or resolution loss.

If you find judder a touch obvious with 24p content, especially during bright scenes, the projector’s Film motion processing option does a pretty smart job of reducing judder without the results devolving into the dreaded soap opera effect.

While many will find it hard to resist the fantastic dynamism and richness of the XR10’s relatively aggressive image presets, film fans who want to see images that look as their creators wanted them to look can rest assured that their needs are catered for brilliantly, too, by the projector’s Filmmaker Mode preset.

This removes a big chunk of the brightness that is one of the XR10’s strengths. But the resulting images look natural, beautifully balanced, full of subtlety and still just excellently watchable despite Filmmaker Mode turning off many of its picture enhancement technologies.

If there’s an issue with the default Filmmaker Mode, it’s that black levels look a bit grey without any of the projector’s contrast enhancement tools in play. Simply setting the projector’s manual iris setting to its ‘One’ level, though, immediately improves black levels, at the expense of a just slightly cooler look to the image.

Aside from some DLP rainbow striping with very extreme contrast content, this set-up suggestion leads us to arguably the XR10’s one major image flaw. Namely, you need to be prepared to tinker with a few of the projector’s settings to get the best from it. It’s not quite the simple 'unbox, switch on and instantly relax deal' you might have been hoping for.

For instance, while the Dolby Vision Bright preset the XR10 defaults to with Dolby Vision content delivers great contrast for such a bright projector, it pushes some colours too strongly. Greens are over-dominant and skin tones look too ripe. The core colour temperature can also fluctuate within a shot if there are significant light level variations to cope with, and you can sometimes see the projector’s dynamic iris system doing its work too obviously.

Setting the manual iris setting to level 1 helps balance colours and eliminates the fluctuating colour tone, but suddenly sees green tones taking on a strangely brownish hue. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this one that simply involves switching to the Dolby Vision Dark preset. This instantly fixes colour balance/consistency issues, delivers natural blacks and skin tones and, if you set the iris feature to ‘0’, leaves the image looking totally stable.

The XR10’s complex iris options include a few presets alongside the multi-step Manual mode. Cinema 1 delivers a nicely judged combination of brightness and contrast, but leaves you having to hit the colour calibration tools to try and stop skin tones and red colours looking too pink, and can also cause some noticeable fluctuations in brightness from the dynamic iris. Cinema 2 delivers some of the best black levels we’ve seen from any projector, but at the expense of huge amounts of the brightness that’s so enjoyable a part of the XR10’s usual picture make-up. Only in a fully blacked-out room is this setting even worth considering, and even then, maybe only the most die-hard accuracy enthusiasts will find the dimness tolerable.

In the end, even where the XR10 offers pre-programmed attempts to provide helpful out-of-the-box feature presets, we ultimately end up reverting to manual intervention via the all-important manual iris setting. A setting which, for better or worse, is kept outside of the picture settings encompassed by the projector’s defined picture presets, so that whatever lens setting you choose applies across every preset for every source until you go back in and change it again.

There are other bits of tinkering we’d recommend too, including turning the sharpness setting to zero but leaving a separate Super Resolution feature active, and braving the projector’s more in-depth colour and white-balance controls, too, if you dare.

The bottom line, though, is that for the most part, making the effort to spend just a few minutes fine-tuning images when you first get the XR10 rewards you with what can be absolutely spectacular but also thoughtful and subtle results. Results capable of adapting, moreover, to pretty much any room shape or ambient light condition.

It’s important to add, too, that the projector responds excellently without manual intervention to the extra picture information provided by the HDR10+ format, making us wish more projectors would adopt this alternative/rival to the Dolby Vision system.

Maybe even more importantly, the XR10’s out-of-the-box dynamic tone mapping system with basic HDR10 content is outstanding. The way it maps the available image data of core HDR10 sources to the projector’s capabilities so that they look dynamic and punchy without succumbing to clipping, unevenness, black crush or colour imbalances is superb, and actually requires less manual intervention than you’d usually expect with most HDR projectors.

The XR10’s automated hardware image correction features work brilliantly, too. So while some of its presets could be better, it’s also actually more helpful than most rivals in other areas of usability and set-up.

One last strength of the XR10 to mention is how incredibly quietly it runs for such a monumentally bright projector. The liquid cooling system Hisense has taken considerable trouble to integrate into the projector proves well worth the effort.

Sound

The XR10’s speakers are capable of pumping out levels of volume and dynamic range that shame many premium TVs. Even at just 50 per cent of its maximum volume, it’s loud enough to satisfy even a quite large room.

Trebles reach high peaks without sounding brittle or warbly, even at high volumes, while at the other end, bass reaches remarkably deep without falling prey to dropouts or crackles, or causing the projector’s metal bodywork to start buzzing. This helps low frequencies avoid sounding overly dominant or distracting, despite how present and deep they are. Similarly, the XR10’s ability to produce high levels of detail in a film or TV mix doesn’t leave busy soundtracks sounding too forensic or ambient effects too bright.

Voices are clean and well-rounded too. The only issue is that they sound a bit trapped inside the projector’s bodywork compared with the rest of the sound mix, which means they also sound rather dislocated from the onscreen action on the other side of the room, and sometimes rather decontextualised from the rest of the soundstage.

Verdict

While it might be the XR10’s startling, beautifully built design that first catches your eye, Hisense’s new showcase projector ultimately justifies its premium price tag with its combination of a startlingly powerful sound system and the best picture quality we’ve seen from any lifestyle or, more accurately, lifestyle/home theatre crossover projector before.

As statements of intent go, it’s hard to see how the XR10 could have served Hisense much better.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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