Projectors vs $50,000 MicroLED? Don’t Turn the Lights On.

Can you match the performance of a MicroLED TV with a much less expensive projector setup? In my last video I installed and tested this 157” MicroLED TV from AWALL in my very bright lake view living room. A ton of people made the comment that a projector and an ambient light rejecting screen is a much more budget friendly way to get a big screen, and I agree, but I wanted to see what a $5000, $10,000, or even $20,000+ projector setup would look like compared to the $50,000 MicroLED with varying amounts of ambient light and then in a completely dark untreated room.

So while the ultimate goal for this room was to be able to watch a big screen with the windows wide open to enjoy the view, to give the projectors a fighting chance step 1 was getting some light control because the blinds that came with the house were old, broken, and the middle one wasn’t even long enough to cover the whole window. I went with battery powered Z-Wave motorized blinds from SmartWings. These are roman shades with full blackout fabric, but since I installed them above the windows rather than inside the frame there is still some light leak through the sides. If you wanted true blackout you would go with a roller shade mounted inside the frame combined with their light blocking side rails.

Step 2 was assembling the massive ambient light rejecting screen. For the standard throw projectors, I’ll be using a custom 153” diagonal Spectra Shadowscape, a long throw lenticular screen with a 0.6 gain that’s 141” wide and 59” tall for a true 2.40:1 aspect ratio. That’s the same size cinemascope screen that the AWALL produces but the Shadowscape can also go up to a max of 160” for cinemascope screens or 130” for 16:9 since the material is limited to 63” in height.

For the ultra-short throw projectors, I’ll be using a 150” Spectra Equinox 0.7 gain lenticular floor rising screen since the 150” UST Fresnel screens that were all over CES aren’t for sale yet, and unfortunately there aren’t any custom sized cinemascope Fresnel screens.

Unlike my normal side-by-side testing, I couldn’t film multiple projectors at the same time due to the size of the screen, but I did keep all of the camera settings identical for each test. Starting first with the daytime testing, the least expensive projector in this video is the $1559 XGIMI Horizon 20 on the left and it will go up against its big brother, the $2699 XGIMI Horizon 20 Max on the right.

During the day with the windows open you can see that the more expensive and significantly brighter Horizon Max does a better job of cutting through the ambient light. But even with that extra brightness I wouldn’t call either of these projectors particularly watchable in these conditions and while bright scenes are easily visible, they are definitely not good and darker scenes are hard to follow with a lot of missing detail.

So next, we’ll give the projectors a bit more of a fighting chance by closing the blinds, but as I mentioned there’s still some light that leaks through the sides as well as some light coming from adjacent rooms, and for the first test I’m also going to leave on the overhead lighting.

After eliminating most of the sunlight from the windows, both projectors are now at least watchable, even with the lights on. But again, you can see that the Horizon 20 Max’s extra brightness makes a big difference when viewing conditions are relatively poor. In the brightest scenes, the Max’s colors look much more vibrant thanks to the extra brightness and any advantage that the Horizon 20 might have in terms of a lower black floor are completely negated by the ambient light.

Last with the blinds closed and the lights off, the Horizon 20’s performance is surprisingly similar to the Horizon 20 Max. The extra brightness is visible especially in the highlights, but so is the lower black floor of the Horizon 20. In the darkest scenes the less expensive Horizon 20 actually appears to have a slight advantage, but it’s hard to tell if there may just be additional ambient light sneaking into the room for the Horizon Max, so for the last test I’ll wait until night, close the blinds, and turn off all the lights in the house.

As I noticed in my earlier reviews of these two projectors, the lower overall brightness of the Horizon 20 makes dark room viewing much more enjoyable since the black floor is also significantly lower, and while there’s also a clear difference in the maximum brightness, I significantly preferred the Horizon 20 for dark room viewing, so in this round I’m going to declare the Horizon 20 Max the winner for daytime viewing, and the Horizon 20 base the winner at night.

So, in round 2 during the day the Horizon 20 Max on the left will face off against the $3199 Nexigo Aurora Pro MKII on the right. I need to point out that this isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, not only because the floor rising UST screen is 0.7 gain vs 0.6 on the Spectra Shadowscape, but also because the floor riser is a 150” diagonal 16:9 screen, which means for cinemascope content it’s only 142” diagonal vs 153” on the custom Shadowscape.

But even with those two advantages and the Aurora Pro set to its ultra bright settings, the Horizon 20 Max appears significantly brighter. But again, I wouldn’t say that either screen is particularly watchable with the blinds open.

With the blinds closed and lights on, the XGIMI Horizon 20 Max is again significantly brighter and more vibrant, both in bright and dark content, and actually looks really good when there aren’t too many completely black areas on the screen.

Turning the lights off, the strengths of the Nexigo, which are its excellent native contrast and dynamic iris started to come through, but I still strongly preferred the XGIMI Horizon 20 Max, even with just a small amount of ambient light in the room, meaning the XGIMI Horizon 20 Max will remain in the top spot for daytime viewing.

For night viewing, the XGIMI Horizon 20 base is on the left and the Nexigo Aurora Pro MKII is on the right. You can see that with the Nexigo’s dynamic iris, dark scenes are significantly dimmer overall, which makes the contrast difference harder to detect, but in person the darkest parts of the scene on the Nexigo had an extremely low black level, which made the highlights just as impactful as your pupils dilate to the lower light level, and showing just pure black level performance the Nexigo clearly took the win for night performance.

So round 3 then puts the current daytime leader, the XGIMI Horizon 20 Max on the left and the new $3999 XGIMI Titan on the right. Compared to the XGIMI Horizon 20 Max’s roughly 3000 usable lumens, the Titan puts out 4750 in TV mode, which I used instead of movie mode that currently has a bug causing color shifts when using the dynamic black level enhancement, but TV mode doesn’t exhibit any noticeable color shifts.

With the blinds open, again, neither projector is great just due to the amount of ambient light on the screen, but once the blinds are closed they both become very watchable and the extra 1700 lumens of brightness on the Titan does a great job punching through the overhead lights. With the blinds closed and the lights off the Titan took an even more commanding lead, making it a clear leader so far for daytime viewing.

Switching to nighttime viewing, the Titan was surprisingly good, much better than I was expecting, and Titan’s full fade to black really helped to accentuate the highlights which were incredibly bright compared to the Nexigo. While you can see that the Nexigo’s absolute black floor was slightly lower due to its dynamic iris, the Titan’s overall brightness made intrascene contrast appear higher. My only complaint about the Titan’s nighttime performance is it has more light leaks around the screen than I’d like, but overall, I’m going to give it the win specifically for these massive low gain ALR screens where the Nexigo Aurora Pro MKII just doesn’t have enough raw brightness to properly display extreme highlights.

So that makes the XGIMI Titan the current leader for both day and night viewing. In round 4 it’s going to go up against the $3999 Valerion Max, but I’ve got a bit of a trick for the Valerion, which is the first test of Spexman’s custom cinemascope lens which stretches the native width and compresses the native height of the Valerion’s image to fit onto a cinemascope wide screen. So unlike a normal 16:9 projector that displays 3840×2160 pixels and has 280 pixels at the top and 280 pixels at the bottom projected off of the screen when fit to a cinemascope screen, the Spexman lens bends the light to fit natively into a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, which not only increases pixel density and brightness by roughly 25% by utilizing screen area that would normally be in the letterboxes, but it also prevents light spill outside of the screen area when using a cinemascope screen.

With the blinds open and lights on, the two projectors look surprisingly similar, which is impressive considering the Titan has a couple thousand extra lumens compared to the Valerion. But with the blinds closed you can clearly see the difference in the brightness of the highlights that the Titan can provide and even with the lights off the Titan looked considerably better due to its extra brightness but also had excellent intrascene contrast.

At night I expected the Valerion Max to dominate, but keeping the iris at level 2 to maintain enough brightness to fill this massive low gain screen, the Valerion Max had only slightly better overall contrast during the Tron: Ares trailer and the Titan avoided the clipping that is commonly associated with Valerion’s EBL High setting. 

However, in the darkest scenes, EBL on the Valerion not only achieved a slightly lower black floor but also resulted in a more dramatic image, again, with occasional clipping.

In the raw black level test with the intro to Pluribus, the Valerion came out ever so slightly ahead, so I’m going to give it a narrow win over the Titan, but it was extremely close.

That means in round 5 the current daytime leader the XGIMI Titan is on the left and the $5997 Hisense L9Q is on the right. Remember that the 150” floor riser is about 10” diagonal smaller than the Shadowscape, but still neither of them are able to compete with the ambient light from the open blinds.

With the blinds closed and the lights on, the Hisense was about equal to the Titan in terms of brightness, but the screen was significantly more washed out. The same was true with the lights off where the Hisense didn’t necessarily look bad, but in scenes that included dark portions it overall just felt washed out and gray compared to the Titan.

At night, the current leader, the Valerion Max with the Spexman Anamorphic lens is on the left and the Hisense L9Q is on the right. These results are so strange, since the L9Q is supposed to be 1500 lumens brighter than the Valerion and have higher native contrast, but the L9Q just didn’t even come close to the brightness, contrast, black floor, or color vibrance of the Valerion.

That means that headed into the last round of projectors we’ve got the current daytime leader, the XGIMI Titan on the left and the $17,500 Epson QL3000 on the right. Although the 6000 lumen Epson QL3000 is easily the best performing and most watchable image yet, it still doesn’t look good at all with the blinds open.

Closing the blinds and leaving the lights on, both projectors get substantially better, but the Epson is just ever so slightly better in terms of overall brightness and color volume. Again, it’s just a limitation of the screen but neither projector can get dark enough to really show the detail in darker content.

With the lights off and blinds closed, the Epson stayed firmly in the lead and is going to take the first-place spot from the XGIMI Titan for daytime viewing, though not by as large of a margin as you’d expect given their price difference.

Moving onto night viewing, the current leader, the Valerion Max with the Spexman Anamorphic lens is on the left and the Epson QL3000 is on the right. I know I probably shouldn’t be all that impressed by a $17,000 projector performing well at night, but I honestly expected the Valerion to easily win this round. In reality it was extremely close and aside from some extra highlights from EBL on the Valerion and some slightly different color space handling, both projectors were almost identical in Tron: Ares, and in the raw black level test from the Pluribus intro, the black floor on the Epson may have even been slightly lower than the Valerion, but in the interrogation scene from Obiwan the Epson got weird with the color space causing some strange blotchiness and loss of detail, so I’m going to give the slight edge to the Valerion, but again, the QL3000 is surprisingly good, even for dark room viewing.

The last step is to compare them to the AWALL 157” MicroLED, so we’ll put the best projector for daytime viewing, the Epson QL3000 on the left and the AWALL on the right. With the blinds open and lights on there’s just no comparison. The black level that the MicroLED can achieve is just not comparable to any ALR screen on the market, and if you can believe it, the AWALL is actually in its night picture mode here at 30% brightness because maintaining the same camera settings that I used throughout the video results in a completely overexposed image of the AWALL at full brightness.

With the blinds closed, the AWALL gets even better and looks absolutely unreal, even with the lights on. With the lights off, the gap closes a little bit, but the $50,000 AWALL is still head and shoulders above the $20,000 combination of the spectra Shadowscape and Epson QL3000.

At night, the top performing projector, the Valerion Max with Spexman Anamorphic lens is on the left and the AWALL MicroLED is on the right, again, set to 30% brightness, which somewhat limits its HDR abilities, but the AWALL still looks basically as good as you could ever want it to with bright vibrant colors and a deeper black floor than I’ve ever seen on a screen this big.

It didn’t matter what the content was, the AWALL’s self-emissive MicroLEDs consistently produced one of the most impressive images I’ve ever seen, and again, that’s a 30% brightness, and unleashing all 1200 possible nits for eye searing HDR highlights is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

So, to answer the question, can you match the performance of a 157” MicroLED screen for a fraction of the price? Unfortunately, no, not really. If you have a room where you want to leave your blinds open and lights on, there is no combination of projector and screen that can even come close to competing with a MicroLED in terms of brightness, black floor, and color vibrance.

However, if you’re willing to control the light in your room by closing the blinds and keeping the lights off, a bright projector like the Epson QL3000 or XGIMI Titan paired with a high-quality long throw ALR screen like the Spectra Shadowscape can get you about 70% of the performance of a MicroLED, for a lot less money.

For dark room viewing, the AWALL performed better than I ever could have imagined, better than any projector I’ve ever seen, and it’s like watching a 157” version of my 65” LG OLED.  BUT, for a lot less money you can get yourself a Valerion Max, Scope Lens, and a giant cinemascope screen and get about 90% of the performance for 20% of the price.

Big thanks to Brian at projectorscreen.com for loaning me his personal QL3000 out of his home theater for this video, so I didn’t have to buy one, and as always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have affiliate links below for everything in this in this video and as always, I appreciate when you use those links since as an affiliate I do earn a small commission on the sale at no cost to you.

If you’re looking for more in-depth information about the XGIMI Titan and Spexman Anamorphic lens I’ll be posting more reviews of them on my 2^nd channel, and I’ll also leave a link to that below.

I’d also like to thank all of my awesome patrons over at Patreon for their continued support of my channel, and if you’re interested in supporting my channel please check out the links below. If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and as always, thanks for watching The Hook Up.