CNN Underscored hit the ground at CES 2024 in Las Vegas to pick out the tech products that are actually worth your attention. Be sure to follow our CES 2024 coverage hub for all of our hands-on previews straight from the world’s biggest electronics show
XGIMI has impressed us over the years with their high-end projectors that can turn any room in your home into a movie theater. At CES 2024, they’re doing that yet again with the introduction of the Horizon Max, one of the only projectors you’ll find that uses IMAX technology to enhance its picture quality.
That sounds like a major deal, and it is. XGIMI says this is the first long-throw smart projector that comes with IMAX Enhanced certification, a spec that previously remained exclusive to more costly projectors. The new device is also making a handful of improvements over last year’s Horizon Ultra, including a fancy new stand that lets the projector automatically spin around the room to find the right angle.
We were given a sneak peek of the Horizon Ultra at CES, and it left us very excited to test drive it in our own home.
Pricing and availability
XGIMI says the Horizon Max will launch by the end of the year. I asked some of the executives if it would be ready by the holidays, and they indicated that it would be. They also said the price would be less than $3,000, but that could obviously change before it launches.
Bringing the best of the movies to your home
The big draw to this projector is its IMAX Enhanced certification. Not only is it incredibly cool to have similar technology to your favorite movie theater but it’s extremely rare to find in the home projector market.
The certification brings the Horizon Max’s picture quality up to IMAX’s standards for optimal picture and image quality. It also means this projector is perfect for streaming IMAX Enhanced titles from services like Disney+. XGIMI says it wanted first to achieve Dolby Vision certification, which it did successfully with the Horizon Ultra last year. Now, it’ll focus on bringing IMAX to more of its products.
A swiveling design with souped-up specs
Being an IMAX projector, it’s only appropriate for the Horizon Max to look the part. XGIMI gave the projector quite the aesthetic, with a dark-gray body and wooden cover for the speakers. It feels a bit retro, which is a lot of fun. The lens system is located behind a piece of glass at the top, and the whole thing is propped up by a stand that has a few neat tricks up its sleeve.
For one, the stand lets the projector automatically adjust its throw angle up or down to accommodate for the wall it’s projecting on. We saw a demo of that in action at XGIMI’s booth at CES, and it seemed to work well. It was able to avoid obstructions with ease and position the projection in an ideal spot for viewing.
There’s also a motorized, 360-degree plate on the bottom of the stand that lets the Horizon Max swivel automatically to adjust the angle accordingly. Combined with its ability to move up and down automatically, there was a lot going on when the Horizon Max saw a wall in front of it and decided to start adjusting things. In the end, it was able to locate a great spot for projecting.
These features work in conjunction with automatic keystone correction, autofocus, XGIMI’s Intelligent Obstacle Avoidance and color tone adjustments for getting the right picture quality on your wall without having to manually adjust anything.
There’s also a new feature called Intelligent Screen Adaption 5.0, or ISA 5.0, that uses new hardware and software enhancements to read the surface the projector is looking at and make adjustments accordingly. It uses a unique, fully automated motorized gimbal and a 3D time-of-flight system (similar to the one in Face ID on the iPhone) to map out the angle and depth of the surface and automatically make adjustments for the perfect positioning. Plus, it can remember each surface you shine it on, so the adjustments are automatically applied when you fire it up later.
There’s also Dual Light 2.0, XGIMI’s new dual-light light source that integrates a triple laser, a phosphor light and MCL lasers to achieve a broader range of colors and boost the brightness of the projection significantly. According to the company, this thing has an “ultrawide” color gamut, 3,100 ISO lumens of brightness (which is 35% more than the already impressive Horizon Ultra), a 2000:1 native contrast ratio and improved color accuracy. Together, these specs help the Horizon Max earn its IMAX Enhanced certification, which will help all the content you play from it look better than any XGIMI projector before.
XGIMI says ISA 5.0 and Dual Light 2.0 will both ship on more projectors later this year, after first appearing on the Horizon Max.
A couple of final notes on the specs:
• The Horizon Max can stretch its projection up to 200 inches. We saw a demo with IMAX content at 180 inches and everything looked sharp, bright, and colorful, so I imagine that experience will carry over to 200 inches.
• There are two 12W Harman Kardon speakers inside the Horizon Max, but we weren’t able to test drive them during our booth tour.
• It comes with two HDMI 2.1 ports, so you can enjoy the benefits of the latest HDMI spec, like better bandwidth for 4K content.
• You’ll have plenty of room to store apps, games and more, thank with to the inclusion of 128GB of storage.
It’s still easy to use
XGIMI maintains an easy-to-use experience with the Horizon Max, thanks to the inclusion of Android TV or Google TV. (At the time of writing, the company hasn’t decided which version of the OS will make it onto production models.) It’ll also come with a custom remote for controlling everything, and the setup process will be similar to the Horizon Ultra, which was abundantly simple to walk through.
Bottom line
The Horizon Max left us impressed with what XGIMI is capable of. There’s nothing quite like this on the market, especially not in the home projector space. I’ll be curious to see how well all its flashy new features work in the real world when I get my hands on a review sample, so stay tuned.