Borrowing an XGIMI Horizon Pro, man does it impress me
I’ve actually got a specific plan for a review of the XGIMI Horizon Pro, but the weather has not been cooperating – tonight’s movie night rained out, last night it was 95F, weekend it was raining when I had a chance. Just some notes here on my first encounter with the unit.
September 21, 2023: Hey a quick update to articles referencing the XGIMI Horizon Pro, or XGIMI Elfin. Brightness claims were listed based on information provided by the manufacturer at the time. XGIMI has reached a settlement with Epson to switch from ANSI to ISO standards and additionally change the brightness claims of a few of their projectors that overstated them. As I wrote a lot of XGIMI articles I am copying this block and saying if you see it say the Horizon Pro is 2200 ANSI lumens, it’s actually 1500 ISO lumens. The 800 ANSI Lumen claim of the Elfin is now 600 ISO lumens. These still appear to respectively overstate brightness by about 17% & 6% when accounting for conversion.
Not a review, just a “wow, look at what I’m testing dude…”
My goal with it is to have an outdoor movie night using nothing but power and a screen. I’m not being particularly spontanious. The rain and winds blowing over the screen have other goals. The next goal is a Girl Scout’s Movie Night which will be coming up soon, however that’s going to be inside at a school with the world’s worst Wi-Fi. But I digress.
Let me tell you about the XGIMI Horizon Pro and what I’ve done with it over the last six hours and why I think I could very easily ditch a physical TV for it at this point. This at six hours… so take it as you will.
Setting up the XGIMI Horizon Pro
I powered it on, I got a notice on my phone that there was a device to set up. I tapped set up the device on my phone. Authorized it to access my account. It was done. I was in and I had an Android TV device up and running in what seemed like two minutes. I selected a few items to install that were suggested by Google and a couple that were suggested by XGIMI, deselected a couple items it thought I wanted based on my account (sorry, don’t need Auralux on it, no idea how I would play.)
And it was done. The unit I’m borrowing asked for a system update, I did that, and bam. Functional Android TV unit popped up. I suspect it has the same Netflix issues as the XGIMI Elfin does, but this is just me getting ready for testing fully.
Going for offline use
So the first thing I’m working on here is getting the content offline as I’m going to be in Wi-Fi death on both of my tests. For this I would generally have slapped a USB thumb drive in but somehow 300 GB of thumb drives have gone missing for no reason I can tell, so I attached an M2 drive in a USB case because that’s what I had handy. It powered and recognized a USB drive and did as expected.
I noted there were 32 gigs of online storage, of which some number over 10 was free – that’s all I needed to copy a movie over so I don’t risk losing it if the drive disappears, although I still have not done this. I decided to play a few movies using the built in player to see how it worked. Let me tell you, a 2160p projector 2200 ANSI lumen projector vs my very happy little 800 lumen Elfin just made me feel bad for myself.
I feel the image I’m seeing on my white wall (can’t get outside to put up the screen still,) is almost as good as my 4K TV and significantly more vivid in medium to low light. Image is beautiful.
That sound, it’s pretty good
I’m not going to fawn over the sound, but I can use this without shame as a speaker for the Girl Scouts event I’m going to be present at. Might bring something else, but if I can’t it’s loud enough to handle it.
Oh hey, this isn’t a review
This will get a review, but man, if you’re considering getting one of these, research it… or you know, wait for me to actually get the level of not-fanboi review written up in a week or two… however considering what I’m seeing, fan may be coming.
They’re at Amazon, and man this is going to hurt to return
