Xgimi Horizon 20 Max review

Xgimi’s latest bid to turn the world’s living rooms into cinemas is its most all-round spectacular projector yet.

The Horizon 20 Max’s eye-catching design is out to make light of the often complicated job of projector set-up.

Its retina-challenging claimed brightness of 5700 ISO lumens is out to cut through ambient light like a knife through butter.

Its claimed 20,000:1 contrast ratio is out to suggest the projector might actually be able to turn itself into a proper home cinema machine for movie nights.

And its claimed 110 per cent coverage of the AV world’s most extreme BT.2020 colour gamut is out to make it look locked and loaded for whatever video challenges the future might bring.

Exciting stuff indeed. Unless it’s all just hype, of course.

Price

The Horizon 20 Max’s price puts it in arguably the single most competitive projector space right now.

Around its level can be found all manner of weird and more or less wonderful serious home entertainment projectors, all keen to combine lifestyle convenience with genuine performance skills.

Key rivals, for instance, would be BenQ’s X3100i and the recently reviewed Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2, both of which back up their on-paper appeal with the real five-star performance deal.

Despite still being relatively new to the projector scene, though, Xgimi has already proved capable of staking a strong claim to even the most competitive projection turf, so we can’t see any reason why the Horizon 20 Max can’t also at least keep up with the Joneses. Especially given the sort of on-paper features and specifications it boasts.

Design

While projectors that join the Horizon 20 Max in adopting a roughly cubic shape are pretty common these days, Xgimi’s model still manages to stand out from the crowd for two main reasons.

First, it hangs its cubic form in a distinctive cradle stand, within which the projector can be effortlessly tilted up and down to get its pictures in the right place on your wall or, ideally, screen.

The hinge mechanism that makes this possible is outstanding, supporting the meaty projector body as if it’s no heavier than a handful of candy floss, while at the same time allowing you to adjust the projector’s angle of attack over clearly defined and well-calibrated steps.

The whole cradle rig can be rotated left or right on the unit’s circular base, too, with the rotating movement again impressing with how smooth and clean it is.

The other unusual feature of the Horizon 20 Max’s design is the leather-like texture of its ‘elephant grey’ finish. This soft finish creates an unusual combination of tactile warmth and premium quality that’s unique in even the Horizon 20 Max’s relatively design-led part of the projector market.

The Horizon 20 Max is joined by a crisp, button-lite remote control that combines a smooth metallic finish element for its bottom half and side/rear elements with a matte black-backed button section offset by a gleaming black metallic-looking navigation circle at its heart. The key buttons on the remote are helpfully backlit, too.

Features

While the Horizon 20 Max’s design is flexible and innovative enough to be classed as a feature in itself, its attractions run much more than skin deep.

For starters, its triple-laser 4K DLP optical engine is claimed to be capable of blasting out a monumental 5700 ISO lumens of peak brightness. That’s one of the highest brightness figures we’ve seen from any projector, and it seems like it should be impossible from a projector as compact and affordable as the Horizon 20 Max.

Other big Horizon 20 Max numbers include a claimed 20,000:1 contrast ratio courtesy of the projector’s dynamic light control systems, claimed coverage of 110 per cent of the extreme BT.2020 colour spectrum (most HDR content is mastered in the much narrower DCI-P3 spectrum), and the claimed ability to satisfy a screen as big as 300 inches.

Gamers will be pleased to learn that the Horizon 20 Max can handle refresh rates all the way up to 240Hz. Those refresh rates can be variable, too, and unlike some rivals, the Horizon 20 Max can retain 4K and HDR when you’re gaming at 120Hz.

The Horizon 20 Max’s operating system is built around Google TV. This brings with it most of the world’s most popular streaming services, including Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV, as well as most of the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster catch-up services.

The only things missing are the BBC iPlayer, which hardly ever appears on Google-based products, and both the Freeview Play and Freely services.

It becomes apparent while exploring the Horizon 20 Max’s smart features that it impressively supports both the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ premium HDR formats. After years of projectors not supporting either of these formats, with their extra scene-by-scene HDR image information, we’ve now tested two in a row.

The Horizon 20 Max’s connections include a pair of HDMIs (one of which supports eARC for shipping sound through to a connected AVR or soundbar), two USB ports, an optical digital audio output, a 3.5mm audio line out, as well as the now pretty much obligatory Bluetooth and wi-fi streaming options.

The Horizon 20 Max’s attempts to make itself easy to set up and adapt to different room arrangements don’t stop at its unusual cradled design. It also offers motorised horizontal and vertical optical image shifting, and motorised zoom. All of which are delivered via outstandingly refined and smooth mechanisms. Plus, there’s auto keystone correction, intelligent obstacle avoidance and screen alignment systems, an autofocus system, and even the facility to adjust the projector’s colour to compensate for different wall colours.

The words 'Sound By Harman Kardon’ at the bottom right of a grilled area over the bottom half of the Horizon 20 Max’s fascia alert you to the presence of a potentially unusually powerful sound system by projector standards. This turns out to comprise a 2 x 12W speaker arrangement with DTS Virtual:X and Dolby Audio decoding – with the cubic design providing more room for sound to breathe than regular projector designs do.

Picture

The Horizon 20 Max is capable of being a seriously enjoyable watch across a surprisingly wide range of room conditions.

It’s great to discover, for starters, that Xgimi seems to have taken on board past criticisms that its projectors can be a little too interested in aggressive spectacle over the naturalism and balance that more serious AV fans desire. Basically, the Horizon 20 Max not only now provides easy-access presets that cater sensibly for both bright and dark room set-ups, but it’s clearly worked hard to make sure that its newly diverse range of preset options are actually quite thoughtfully calibrated.

There’s even a Filmmaker Mode on the Horizon 20 Max, in fact, designed to produce pictures that get as close as the projector can manage to the look of industry video mastering standards.

Unusually, though, the Horizon 20 Max only seems to let you access Filmmaker Mode if it’s triggered by a flag in the content you’re watching. There’s no manually selectable Filmmaker Mode in the list of different presets the projector lets you choose between. Which means, essentially, that while Filmmaker Mode may trigger with some streamed content, you can’t apply it to 4K Blu-rays given that no 4K Blu-rays, so far as we’re aware, have been mastered with the Filmmaker Mode flag embedded.

It’s fortunate, then, that the Movie preset that the Horizon 20 Max does provide is very effective, injecting a level of warmth, subtlety and balance into the image that old Xgimi would not have done so well.

Colours – even skin tones – look believable and balanced, and there’s enough subtlety in the rendering of the image’s colour tones to ensure that nothing looks plasticky, flat, garish or cartoonish. Nor is there any significant evidence of colour striping over colour blends.

This welcome new interest from Xgimi in creating a picture that’s built around immersion, balance and refinement is joined by outstanding sharpness, too. Truly native 4K projection still isn’t yet an option at the Horizon 20 Max’s price level, but the crispness and sense of detail and texture in this Xgimi’s pictures look at least 4K adjacent. Without, crucially, anything feeling over-sharpened.

While the Movie preset is an overall great option for watching movies and premium TV shows in a relatively dark or fully blacked-out room, viewing in such conditions does reveal slightly raised black tones during dark scenes. This issue is nothing like as bad as we might have expected from a projector with 5700 ISO lumens of claimed brightness in its locker, but there’s certainly a slightly greyer look to dark areas than we experienced with a well-set-up Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 – though that Valerion model doesn’t look quite as bright and punchy as the Horizon 20 Max.

The Xgimi’s brightness really is impressive. As well as helping images retain enjoyable punch and dynamism even in quite high levels of ambient light, this brightness is also put to excellent use by Xgimi’s dynamic tone mapping system in creating a genuine HDR ‘feel’ to the presentation of HDR sources. This includes some proper intensity in bright peaks, such as sunlight reflecting on metal or glass.

Having said all that, you shouldn’t expect to get anything like the Horizon 20 Max’s full claimed light output while still watching enjoyable pictures. This is because you can only access the projector’s full light output by switching the projector to a High Brightness picture preset which, while undoubtedly almost unbelievably bright, also does some very strange things to the image’s colours, leaving them looking washed out and excessively ‘cool’ in tone, to a degree that still looks off even in the relatively high levels of ambient light this setting is presumably designed to fight against.

Happily, though, the Standard or even Vivid presets are both fantastically punchy by projector standards if that’s the look you’re after, or you’re wanting to use the projector in ambient light without suffering such blue-dominated colour shifts. In fact, these two modes actually look extremely vibrant, giving you easy access to Xgimi’s fun, if occasionally OTT, vibrant side.

Xgimi’s new willingness to cater for a wide variety of image tastes is further expanded by the Horizon 20 Max’s ability to play Dolby Vision and HDR10+ content, and the addition of an IMAX Enhanced mode as another very watchable, if slightly more muted, film enthusiast’s alternative to the Movie mode.

Bright Dolby Vision scenes look particularly gorgeous in the Dolby Vision Dark setting – though even with Dolby’s extra help, dark scenes still look a little washed out.

While the Horizon 20 Max makes its biggest mark against the competition with HDR content, it is able to adapt its output very successfully to the much milder demands of SDR, retaining the necessary colour balance and refinement that AV fans look for with SDR playback.

The Xgimi’s brightness and vibrancy contribute to a seriously fun gaming performance that does substantially more justice than most projectors to the HDR graphics that pretty much all AAA games now deploy. No other projectors in the Horizon 20 Max’s class look crisper, brighter or more vibrant in their game modes, in fact. The projector’s 4K 120Hz HDR gaming support delivers a really responsive experience, too, backed up by input lag that measures just 11.1ms with 1080p/60Hz feeds.

Figuring out what gaming features the Horizon 20 Max supports does bring up our toughest battle with its bizarrely over-complicated picture set-up menus, though.

These menus contain an impressive number of tweaks and options, but some are confusingly named, and worse, there appear to be some seriously complex and typically unexplained inter-relationships between some of them. Choosing one option can cause another to become greyed out and inaccessible, for example, and you’re not even always clear about whether a particular feature is actually working or not.

When it comes to gaming, there’s a Game setting in the basic presets section – but this doesn’t introduce any sort of low-latency features. In fact, the lag if you just choose this option is well over 100ms – far too high for a responsive gaming experience.

It turns out that you need to manually select a separate Game option buried deep in the All Settings/Display Settings sub menu, and then additionally select a Boost option within that Game submenu before lag gets down to the 11.1ms figure noted above.

Even weirder, if you turn the Boost mode on, but then turn the ‘secondary’ Game mode off, the Boost mode remains active, even if you’re no longer playing a game. Thankfully, the projector does tend to remind you that Boost mode is active, but then you have to remember how to navigate the tortuous route back to the option that switches it off.

Another issue is that some of the Horizon 20 Max’s picture adjustments are very unrefined, only making coarse, extreme changes to the image when much finer levels of adjustment are needed.

So complex and ‘raw’ are the Horizon 20 Max’s settings, in fact, that we suggest you pretty much just stick with the two or three picture presets you like the most for different light levels rather than getting involved with much fine-tuning. The only exception to this 'leave well alone’ advice, aside from the low lag situation for gamers, concerns the projector’s motion processing. The default setting of this MEMC feature turns films into over-smooth soap operas in its default setting with most picture presets, so you should switch it into its relatively gentle Real Cinema mode, or just turn motion processing off entirely.

Aside from its slightly grey black levels and brain-bending picture set-up options, the one other issue we have with the Horizon 20 Max’s pictures is the rainbow effect. The distracting tell-tale stripes of red, green and blue flit over the image consistently enough to become at least a low-level distraction to most viewers – never mind those people who are particularly prone to seeing this common DLP issue.

Sound

The Horizon 20 Max’s built-in sound system is impressive in many ways. Bass, in particular, is much more present, deep and free of distortions than it is on the vast majority of integrated projector sound systems. The sound also projects forward from the projector very handily, and spreads out rapidly in the process, achieving that very rare projector sound system feat of making its sound appear at least vaguely connected to its pictures.

The integrated speakers are powerful enough to get pretty loud without starting to distort, too, and consistently manage to shift smoothly through a good few gears when playing action scenes without starting to sound muddy or constrained. Especially with low-end sounds kicking in so enthusiastically.

The speakers are sensitive enough to portray plenty of subtle details from busy film soundtracks, too, while the projector’s sound processing manages to place location effects with likeable accuracy. Dialogue remains locked at the heart of the soundstage, though, as it should. In fact, dialogue can go a little far in this respect at times, to the point where it can start to sound a little trapped inside the projector’s belly, especially with male voices.

The only other issue with the Horizon 20 Max’s sound is that the very deepest extended bass rumbles can sound a bit coarse and unrefined compared with the rest of the audio profile. Though the speakers seldom if ever lose their integrity to such an extent that they flat out distort or crackle.

Verdict

There’s a ton of stuff to like about the Horizon 20 Max. Its design is cool, tactile and user-friendly; its feature count for movie fans and gamers is long and useful, and its pictures are fundamentally strong and adapt well to a much wider range of room set-ups than the vast majority of other projectors can.

Dark scenes can look a touch grey if you fancy a serious dark room movie night, though, and the rainbow effect can be hard to ignore. Its set-up menus are bizarrely inscrutable at times, too.

With some impressive sonics to keep its generally good pictures company, though, in the end, the Horizon 20 Max is impossible not to like.

SCORES

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 4

MORE:

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Best projectors: budget, 4K and ultra-short-throw