Pros
- Sliding lens cover is classy
- Dual light sources
Cons
- Gimbaled design
- Below-average contrast ratio
- Below-average color
When I reviewed the predecessor to the Horizon S Max projector, the Horizon Ultra, there was a lot to like. It had an attractive overall design, a slick sliding lens cover, and above-average brightness. Where it needed to improve was with its poor contrast and sluggish streaming. What it didn't need was a pivot and a spinning bottom. Like the JMGO N1S Pro 4K, the Horizon S Max can pivot up and down and has a disc on the bottom that lets it spin around. It seems... superfluous. I'm not going to belabor this point, you can read my JMGO review for some significant belaboring.
The Horizon S Max does offer some improvements. For example, the company bettered the processor, so streaming and menu navigation isn't as sluggish. More importantly, Xgimi nearly doubled the contrast ratio, so the image quality is much better.
But the Horizon S Max lacks a zoom, and offers roughly the same brightness, so it's arguable whether the projector is worth much of a price premium over the Horizon Ultra. As of this writing, the manufacturer's suggested retail prices, or MSRPs, for these two projectors differ by $300, or about 17% more for the S Max. As we'll discuss, that's a lot for what you get.
Specs and such
The Horizon S Max has a motorized lens cover that slides down when you turn on the projector. It looks great.
- Resolution: 4K
- HDR compatible: Yes
- 3D compatible: No
- Lumens spec: 3,100, according to Xgimi
- Zoom: No
- Lens shift: No
- Lamp life: Not listed, but it's lasers and LEDs, so a while
The Horizon S Max has a "hybrid" light engine, with both LED and laser. That isn't unique per se, but it's more common to have one or the other. Xgimi calls this arrangement Dual Light 2.0, and, interestingly, the company lets you switch between Dual Light and just the lasers. The laser-only mode was a little more accurate, but neither mode was particularly "true."
Using the Dual Light 2.0 mode, I measured approximately 1,300 lumens in its most accurate picture mode. That's almost exactly what I measured with the Horizon Ultra (1,333 lumens). In its Boost 10 Plus mode, which the menus advise you not to run too often due to the potential for overheating, I got 1,440 lumens. Unfortunately, like many projector companies, Xgimi actually claims something quite different: 3,100 lumens. Brightness claims almost never match real-world measurements, but many companies lately are pushing the limits of what I'll call "creative marketing." Claims aside, this is unquestionably a bright projector, some 30%-40% brighter than several projectors I've reviewed recently.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment with the S Max compared with the Ultra is the lack of a zoom. This seems like such an odd omission for a more expensive projector, and I find it hard to believe that the addition of a stand where you can pivot or spin the projector offsets that loss (or justifies the higher price).
Connections
Two USB but only one HDMI. Fine, I guess, since it has Google TV built in. But for the price, two HDMI would've been nice.
- HDMI inputs: One
- USB port: Two
- Audio output: eARC
- Internet: Wi-Fi
- Remote: Not backlit
In another feature reduction from the Ultra, the S Max does away with the older projector's dual HDMI, optical, headphone and Ethernet connections. It keeps the two USB but has just a single HDMI. I don't think the loss of the Ethernet or even the optical are that big of a deal, since most people will use Wi-Fi anyway. Despite the inclusion of HDMI eARC, the lack of a headphone jack or that second HDMI is a bit of a bummer. I know a lot of people who have both a PlayStation and an Xbox, and swapping HDMI cables is always annoying.
The 12-watt speakers are tuned by Harman Kardon, and this is true of the Ultra as well. The speakers are in the front of the unit, though, which can make positioning for the best sound awkward. If the projector is beside or in front of you, the sound is duller. To get the speakers pointing at your ears from behind you, you'd have to move the projector back, and since there's no zoom, you'd need to make the image a lot bigger than the usual 100-inch size (basically your whole wall, floor to ceiling).
Still no input button! At least the menus aren't as sluggish as the Ultra's, so pressing the settings button and a few presses down on the control pad will let you select the HDMI input.
The remote still doesn't have an input button, and yes, this is a hill I will die on. At least now the processor isn't as sluggish, so it's fairly quick to pull up the settings menu and select the HDMI input.
Picture quality comparisons
The JMGO N1S Pro 4K is about as close a competitor as you can get. Each unit's MSRPs are within $100 of each other, and the projectors share a gimbaled design. They share some parts too, seemingly, but that's a rabbit hole I choose to avoid because it's likely too "inside baseball." The BenQ X500i is a little cheaper, but it's a recent favorite. It's also a more traditional short-throw projector, needing to be 25%-50% closer to the screen than the others. I connected them to a Monoprice 1x4 distribution amplifier and viewed them side by side on a 102-inch, 1.0-gain screen.
Unfortunately, there's no zoom like there is with the cheaper Ultra.
All three projectors are acceptably bright and can easily create more than enough light on a 100-inch screen. At some point, I'll probably have to start recalibrating my brain as to what constitutes a "bright" projector, but these are all around 1,000 lumens, which is plenty. The only projectors I've tested that are capable of a lot more than that all had significant picture quality compromises. The Xgimi is the brightest of this bunch, even in its most accurate mode, but in this case that means less than 10% brighter than the JMGO. They're all bright enough that, side by side, you wouldn't really notice one or another being brighter or dimmer.
Contrast ratio is a more interesting story. This crucial measurement, comparing the brightest and dimmest images a projector can produce, is always a fabricated number by manufacturers. Which is why we measure it. While it has better contrast than the cheaper Horizon Ultra, this Xgimi is the worst of this test trio, about 30% worse than the JMGO and a third of the BenQ. On screen, the Xgimi doesn't look washed out — its performance in this test is only a little worse than average — but it doesn't have the punchiness of the BenQ. Black bars, when you're watching 2.35:1 aspect ratio movies, are more noticeable. The S Max does have an iris in its light path, and if you enable it in the menu, you can even hear it click when it activates. While this does increase its contrast ratio roughly 50%, this is dynamic contrast, not native. So within any single image, the contrast ratio is still below average. Darker scenes just have a little darker black levels because the whole image is a little darker. Which is to say, it doesn't help much.
Color is what most sets the Horizon S Max apart from the others, but not in a good way. Despite having a setting called Professional-grade Color Accuracy, it doesn't look as natural or as accurate as the BenQ. The JMGO isn't accurate either, but it's more pleasingly inaccurate, if you will. Caucasian skin tones look slightly sickly on the S Max. It's not so inaccurate that it would look wildly wrong on its own, but measurements and side by side tell a more complete story.
The built-in turntable looks remarkably similar to the one used by JMGO for the same purpose.
Just to mention it, both the JMGO and Xgimi have high brightness modes (Ultra Brightness and 10 Plus Boost, respectively) that can significantly increase their light output. These modes also decrease image quality and accuracy, so though I measured their capabilities in these modes, I didn't use them for comparison. They're all plenty bright, and if you want to use those modes, that's up to you, but they'd be a disadvantage in a comparison that was judging image quality.
Close horizon
You can tilt the S Max to shine on the ceiling, if you want.
More than anything, I'm confused by the Horizon S Max. It's a sort of one-step forward, two-steps back scenario. I think it's great that Xgimi improved the contrast ratio, but the S Max is positioned as a step up from the Ultra, when honestly it's a side step at best. Significant features are dropped, seemingly all for the addition of gimbaled movement that I just can't see being used enough, by most people at least, to justify the cost and feature loss. After all, you can spin any projector just by, you know, spinning it. And while the pivot could allow for quick setup when there isn't a dedicated place or space for a projector, if you're going to sacrifice image quality to the devils of keystone adjustments, you can just prop up a regular projector with anything you have on hand (books, Legos, etc.).
So it's not that the Horizon S Max is bad — in most ways it's above average. It's just that Xgimi didn't keep enough of what made the Horizon Ultra good, while it fixed only some of the things that held it back. Then it added the gimbal and increased the price. Befuddling, to say the least.
There's also the Horizon S Pro, which is cheaper than either the Ultra or the S Max but has a lower claimed brightness of 1,800 lumens. If that's 40% of the S Max's brightness in the real world, that'd be around 780 lumens. That puts it in the range of the BenQ X300G, which has a similar shape and excellent image quality.
So between the S Max and the Ultra, I'd choose the latter. Or if my room could fit a short throw projector, I'd choose the BenQ X500i, which has some of the best picture quality I've seen in years.
