Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 review

While it’s only been around for the blink of an eye by AV standards, having started out in ultra-modern fashion on Kickstarter in 2024, Valerion has already come a long way.

It was officially announced as the premium ‘sub-brand’ of slightly longer-in-the-tooth projector brand AWOL Vision in May 2025, and it’s now already onto its second generation of products.

That second generation of products includes the first Valerion model to ever grace our review pages: the VisionMaster Pro 2.

With a grand name like VisionMaster Pro, a gleaming design that feels like it could go ten rounds with a Sherman Tank and still look catwalk-ready, and not one but two genuine performance boosting updates recently tucked under its belt, Valerion’s latest projector certainly isn’t shy about coming forward.

But can such a nascent brand really hold its own with the best the projector establishment has to offer?

Price

Considering Valerion is positioned as a premium sub-brand of AWOL Vision, the VisionMaster Pro 2’s £2019 / $2999 / AU$4999 price really doesn’t seem unreasonable.

That’s especially true when you consider that this is a projector which, as we’ll see, is packed with convenience and performance-enhancing features, and sports one of the most eye-catching designs the projector world has to offer.

The sort of premium coffee table space the VisionMaster Pro 2 at least looks like it’s designed to fit into, though, is a crowded one these days, with other roughly cube-shaped models such as BenQ’s similarly priced X3100i and Hisense’s much more affordable C1 already setting a high design and performance bar.

Design

Aside from its now quite common cubic shape (usually adopted to accommodate a decent sound system and some extra cooling room to help keep fan noise down), the VisionMaster Pro 2 looks truly unique.

Its top and left/right edges are particularly eye-catching, adorned as they are in a distinctive, deeply ribbed finish where the outer end of each rib features gleaming silvery metal.

The ribbing combines with the fact that the VisionMaster Pro 2 is exceptionally heavy by projector standards to make it a tricky beast to pick up and move.

With the gleaming ribbed sides offset glamorously by beautifully smooth, polished, mirrored glass front and back panels, though, this really is a projector design to admire. Even if your tastes might normally lean towards something more conservative.

The metallic theme continues with the VisionMaster Pro 2’s remote control, which is wrapped very fetchingly across its bottom third, around its edges and over the navigation buttons by a beautifully premium-feeling brushed metal finish.

This is offset handsomely by a matte black backdrop for the remote’s buttons, which are both backlit and helpfully arranged for the most part.

Features

The VisionMaster Pro 2 packs a handy bag of tricks inside its compact but weighty form. At its heart lies a triple (RGB) laser lighting system feeding into a 4K-capable DLP optical set-up, capable of pumping out a claimed 3000 ISO lumens of light.

That’s a pretty promising brightness figure in our humble opinion, with experience suggesting it has the potential to handily straddle the tricky line between being bright enough to punch through a degree of ambient light, but also not so bright that there’s little to no chance of the projector being able to deliver any decent black levels and contrast.

In fact, Valerion claims a very respectable 15,000:1 contrast ratio for the Pro 2 with the projector running in its most contrast-friendly settings (more on these later).

Remarkably, the VisionMaster Pro 2 is claimed to be capable of covering 110 per cent of the AV world’s most extreme BT2020 colour gamut (well beyond the DCI-P3 range used for most real-world HDR content mastering), and impressively, it’s capable of playing both the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ premium HDR formats.

Projectors able to handle even one of these premium formats are still relatively rare, so the Pro 2’s ability to handle both – essentially meaning the projector can play the best version of any content it’s presented with – feels like a real luxury.

It’s equipped with a Filmmaker Mode setting for quick access to relatively accuracy-based pictures (though we feel its Movie preset actually delivers the most rewarding results in dark room settings).

Also, its IMAX Enhanced certification shows the Valerion been deemed capable of doing justice to the relatively noiseless and screen-filling IMAX Enhanced mastering system.

Finally, ISF certification proves that it has all the tools a professional calibrator needs to optimise the projector to your specific room conditions.

Gamers will be pleased to hear that the VisionMaster Pro 2 can support 240Hz frame rates, at which speed it can render images in just 4ms. HDMI ports one and two can also cope with 4K/120Hz signals with HDR, though the third HDMI tops out at 1080p/120Hz if you want to retain HDR.

Note, though, that as with some TVs, even the two full HDMI 2.1 ports only take in high frame rates with HDR and 4K resolution if you manually select the specific HDMI’s Enhanced Pro option via the projector’s Input menu options.

There’s support for ultra-wide gaming formats (32:9 and 21:9) if you’re playing a PC title that supports such ratios, and you can call up an overlaid crosshair in the centre of the screen to help your aim.

This latter feature is especially useful when you’re dealing with images as big as the 300 inches the VisionMaster Pro 2 claims to have enough edge-to-edge sharpness to successfully deliver. The only gaming disappointment is the lack of any VRR support.

Smart features are handled by a built-in Google TV system. This gives you access to most of the key streaming and UK broadcaster catch-up apps, including Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, Disney+, Apple TV, Channel 4, My5 and ITVX. Though, as usual with Google TV, the BBC iPlayer is notably absent.

There is, though, support for AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Miracast, Google Home, Apple HomeKit and Alexa, with near- and far-field Google Assistant voice control also available.

While the VisionMaster Pro 2 might have designs on being a fairly serious home cinema projector, it can still adapt easily to a range of potential living room set-up situations thanks to auto image size, auto keystone correction and auto focus options, along with manual backup adjustments where required.

The auto size feature is backed up by an unusually generous 0.9x-1.5x level of optical zoom.

Picture

The first thing we should say here is that the way our time with the VisionMaster Pro 2 played out meant that we actually got to see it both before and after it received not one but two firmware updates that seriously improved picture performance in multiple ways.

So, before we get into how a fully updated Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 performs, we recommend that you check if your Pro 2 is running the latest software.

If your model’s DLP firmware version (found in the About/Upgrade section of the Settings/System menu) says it’s in the 7x series, it needs to be upgraded to version 79 – a process that can only be done using a USB storage stick.

If your projector’s DLP firmware is in the 83 series, you don’t need the DLP firmware update.

Once you’re confident your DLP firmware is correct, check that your projector is running firmware version P1215, and if it isn’t, you should be able to get it via manually instigating an over-the-air update. Full details on both update processes can be found in the support area of Valerion’s website.

The DLP update is designed to reduce the projector’s susceptibility to DLP’s projection’s rainbow effect issue, where stripes of red, green and blue can flit around in your peripheral vision or over standout bright objects. And it’s fair to say its effects are pretty transformational.

So much so that the Pro 2’s rainbow effect goes from being consistently and obviously distracting enough to cost the image a full performance mark, to occurring so mildly and rarely that it seldom bothers us at all. It hasn’t completely gone, to be clear, but it really is way, way less of a nuisance.

The P1215 firmware, meanwhile, delivers two other extremely welcome performance enhancements, first by unlocking the ability to adjust the projector’s laser output for the Dolby Vision Dark mode, and second by enhancing the projector’s Dynamic Tone Mapping system for optimising HDR sources to the projector’s capabilities.

The Enhanced Black Level feature for automatically optimising the projector’s laser output to suit each scene you’re watching is pretty essential to getting the most all-round watchable images on the VisionMaster Pro 2.

Being able to apply it on its Low setting to the Dolby Vision Dark mode results in some of the best images we’ve seen on a projector even close to this price level. Black levels go from OK to excellent, without costing much brightness or colour vibrancy at all.

The ‘Low’ Enhanced Black Level setting has a helpful impact on regular HDR10 content, too, transforming images from good if slightly grey in dark scenes, to really cinematic, contrast-rich affairs that wouldn’t look out of place on a much more expensive dedicated home theatre projector.

Making the Enhanced Black Level feature’s impact all the better is that it improves black depth while causing precious little subtle shading detail to become lost in the darkness.

Though if you do feel that dark areas have started looking a touch hollow with the Enhanced Black Level feature engaged, a thoughtfully designed Shadow Detail Enhancement feature is able to do a great job of marginally raising the black level floor when subtle details are present without impacting the overall brightness level.

In a perfect world, more of the Pro 2’s picture presets might have been more effectively set up out of the box, rather than needing manual adjustment. It’s true, too, that achieving the most accurate images using the Filmmaker Mode requires the Enhanced Black Level feature to be turned off, resulting in a slightly flat-looking image.

It’s hard to complain too much about the odd preset foible, though, when Valerion has not only provided fairly straightforward and logical tools for enhancing its images in all the right ways, but has actually delivered those tools with a degree of sensitivity, subtlety and image understanding that’s rare indeed in the ‘lifestyle’ projection world.

Joining the Pro 2’s impressive brightness and contrast is a seriously impressive colour range. This extends comfortably out to the furthest reaches of even the most aggressive HDR masters in our 4K Blu-ray collection, but at the same time, the colour processing uses that range at least as much for delivering subtle shading differences as aggressively vibrant spectacle.

The result is an exceptionally punchy image, but one that doesn’t feel cartoonish or flat. Especially as Valerion’s latest firmware update for the projector seems to have introduced better control over how light combines with colour, causing less clipping of detail in the brightest areas and a better all-round balance of tones across HDR scenes.

The VisionMaster Pro 2 delivers 4K sources with a level of pixel density and sharpness that gets mighty close to native 4K in appearance, despite the projector not having a genuine 4K DLP Digital Mirror Device count.

It even manages to keep that sharpness more or less intact when there’s motion and camera panning to handle, thanks to an unusually effective ‘Film’ motion processing option. This massages away the heaviest judder effects without making the results look unnaturally fluid or generating unwanted and distracting processing side effects.

Even after receiving its latest firmware updates and plying it with a few judicious picture setting tweaks, the VisionMaster Pro 2’s images aren’t entirely niggle free.

We’ve already mentioned that faint traces of the rainbow effect remain. Also, though, bright shots can be affected by a slight glimmering effect of the sort we’d normally associate (at a much stronger level) with watching a bright projector on a high-gain screen.

And, while using the ‘Low’ Enhanced Black Level mode is for us borderline essential to getting the best picture quality from the VisionMaster Pro 2, it can occasionally cause slight brightness instability – and the High Enhanced Black Level option pushes this issue to really quite unpleasant levels. The ‘Clear’ motion processing option applied by default to many of the Pro 2’s presets also causes all sorts of distracting issues.

Finally, while gaming on the VisionMaster Pro 2 is enjoyable and responsive enough at 120Hz frame rates, it feels a little laggy with 60Hz titles. Input lag measures 34.3ms with 1080p/60Hz feeds, which isn’t actually bad. But the real-world 60Hz gaming experience just doesn’t quite feel as responsive and fluid as we’d like.

With any projector, though, especially any projector that wants to have a serious stab at HDR content, there are always going to be picture performance trade-offs.

And the simple fact is that the trade-offs that an updated and mildly tweaked VisionMaster Pro 2 requires you to swallow feel like pretty small beer against all the good stuff Valerion’s projector can do.

Sound

The VisionMaster Pro 2’s integrated 2 x 12W speakers sound much better than most integrated projector speaker systems.

For starters, they have enough power and projection behind them to create at least a sense of a dome of sound existing beyond the projector’s physical bodywork.

Most location effects in a sophisticated movie mix appear fairly accurately placed within this sound dome, too, and the simple fact that the audio can escape the projector’s bodywork helps it sound a bit more attached to the projector’s distant pictures than usual.

Perhaps even more impressive is the depth of bass the Pro 2’s speakers can reach without succumbing to crackling, buzzing or dropouts.

This gives soundtracks a properly cinematic feel you barely ever get with integrated projector sound systems – especially as this impressive low frequency foundation is maintained even during loud, dense action scene moments without the rest of the mix sounding overwhelmed or thin.

There’s even a genuine sense of impact with movie staples such as punches or gunfire.

In a perfect world, the highest treble would sound a little more rounded and smooth, and voices would sound a bit more open and project better from the Valerion’s bodywork.

But the fact that we’re even able to pick out such specific audio issues rather than just being overwhelmed by the general mediocrity most projector audio systems serve up actually proves how much better the VisionMaster Pro 2 sounds than most of its peers.

Verdict

Valerion is, on paper, still a novice brand, and the Kickstarter-plus-major-firmware-updates journey of its VisionMaster Pro 2 projector is unusual to say the least.

It turns out, though, that neither of these apparent challenges has managed to stop the Pro 2 from both becoming a (literally) shining star of the mid-range lifestyle projector scene, and putting Valerion firmly on the home entertainment map.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 4

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