Ultra Short Throw Projectors Mid-Year Update

The NexiGo Aurora Pro MKII and Formovie Theater Premium have gotten a lot of praise on the internet recently, but are either of them good enough to take down the PX3-Pro which was my pick for the best UST of 2024? And can either of them beat out the original NexiGo Aurora Pro when it comes to dark room viewing? Let’s find out, and even if you aren’t interested in these specific projectors, stick around to get a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of modern projector technology.

First, let’s do a bit of deeper dive on brightness and contrast.

Brightness

Brightness is one of the most important aspects of a projector, but projector manufacturers don’t make it easy to figure out what their advertised brightness actually means. Standardization to ISO lumens was a good first step, where nine individual brightness readings are taken using a template, then averaged and multiplied by the screen size in square meters. But most projectors have a bunch of different picture modes, and the brightest one used for all the advertising numbers is almost never the one you’d want to use because of poor contrast, color accuracy, and fan noise.

So, for every projector there are actually three important measurements: the peak brightness where we make sure that a projector can achieve its advertised spec, which as I said is usually a relatively unusable mode, usable brightness where reasonable compromises are made in color accuracy, contrast, and fan noise, and accurate brightness which is how many lumens the projector has in its most color accurate mode, preferably after calibration.

Looking at these four projectors and their advertised brightness, all of them measured within the 10% margin of error allowed for advertised brightness claims in a usable brightness mode, which is great, with the PX3-Pro about 6% over in Standard mode, the Aurora Pro 1 was 3% over in the Brightest picture mode and Brightest Setting, the Aurora Pro MKII was 3% under its claim in that same combination of modes, and the Formovie Theater Premium was about 5% under its claimed brightness in Standard mode, using Office Brightness.

In their most color-accurate modes, the PX3-Pro was still the brightest, but lost around 25% of its lumens switching from Standard to Theater, and from Standard White Balance to Warm 2. The Aurora Pro 1 lost 19%, the MKII lost 17% and the Formovie Theater Premium lost 24%. Right out of the box their color accuracy was okay, but not great with the PX3-Pro coming in with an average SDR delta error 5.17 when measured with Calman Ultimate Color Checker, the Aurora Pro MKII was close behind at 5.35, followed by the Aurora Pro 1 with 5.96, and the Formovie Theater was the least accurate out of the box with an Average Delta Error of 9.21.

To make filming and comparisons easier, I did calibrate each projector to a color dE under 4, and white balance error under 2, which cost the Hisense and NexiGo projectors a few more lumens but actually gained back a few lumens for the Formovie Theater Premium.

Conrast

Contrast is another tricky stat because there are a lot of different ways to measure contrast, and even more ways to game the system. The first thing to measure on each of these projectors is their native contrast, which means when the light source is given 100% power, how effective is the projector at blocking out the light when the scene calls for 100% darkness. The most common way to measure this full-on full-off contrast is by measuring the brightness of an all-white screen and comparing it to an all-black screen. But because manufacturers like to bake in what’s called non-defeatable dimming, I use a pattern with a moving 50% gray box to help prevent dimming tricks. In this test you can see that the PX3-Pro, Aurora Pro 1, and Aurora Pro MK2 basically all have the same native contrast at around 3200:1, which seems to be the current limitation of the 0.47” Texas Instruments DMD in an ultra-short throw projector, and the Formovie Theater Premium measured a little lower for whatever reason at 2513:1 which is still pretty good.

However, the next thing to measure is called dynamic contrast, and it’s the really tricky one. Dynamic contrast can use a bunch of tricks like laser dimming, and in the case of the Aurora Pro MKII, a dynamic iris that can open and close to allow different amounts of light to pass, but there are two main problems with dynamic contrast.

First, even though laser dimming can drastically lower the black floor, laser dimming doesn’t increase the native contrast of the projector. So, while the black levels are better, it will also limit the maximum brightness of any highlights in the image. Dynamic iris is a little different because, in general, a fully closed iris will have higher native contrast than a fully open iris. So, you can actually gain more intra-scene contrast but it’s much harder to subtly move the iris without creating artifacts in the image.

That’s the second problem with dynamic contrast, that even extremely polished dimming algorithms will be noticeable and bothersome to some people. While most people will need to be searching for laser dimming artifacts like brightness pumping and color shifting, even an untrained eye would likely be able to notice artifacts from slow dynamic iris movement.

Luckily, all the projectors have options to disable their dynamic contrast if the artifacts bother you, but I personally think the benefits massively outweigh the occasional imperfections. Using their dynamic modes after calibration I was able to measure 5293:1 dynamic contrast on the NexiGo Aurora Pro, 10335:1 on the Hisense PX3-Pro, and a massive 26231:1 dynamic contrast ratio on the Aurora Pro MKII using Iris Bright and Scene Adapt Engine: Mid.

Side-by-Side Testing

Usually at this point in the video, I start doing tournament style side-by-side comparisons, but I figured since there’s only four projectors it makes sense to put all four on the screen and go through a little of what I’m looking for while I’m evaluating.

Starting with SDR content, I do need to note that the Formovie Theater Premium has the latest firmware with all the 3D bug fixes, but it still doesn’t use the right color space by default, so for SDR content you need to go to the color space option and change it from Auto to On, which makes it use the same color space as the video source.

The first obvious question to ask is which one looks the best, as in which is the most eye catching and usually that’s mostly the result of brightness and intra-scene contrast. If I stop on a random frame, you can see that all the projectors look pretty good, but the Formovie Theater Premium has crushed some shadow detail in Dani’s hair, and the PX3-Pro has a lot more brightness in the patch of sky in the upper left corner. Sometimes it’s difficult to judge color accuracy when there are four similar images side by side, but to me the skin tones look the best on the PX3-Pro and Aurora Pro MK2 with the Formovie Theater Premium leaning a bit too pink and the Aurora Pro 1 looking a little blotchy. Bringing in the reference footage which is the raw video file not being played by any device, you can see that the PX3-Pro pretty much nailed it in terms of skin tone accuracy and tone mapping. But none of them handled the patch of sky particularly well and the Aurora Pro 1 and MKII were a bit dim while the PX3-Pro was too white and too bright, and I think the Formovie Theater Premium was the closest to the source in terms of background colors.

Moving on to Henry, we can see that the PX3-Pro nailed the skin tones again, but the pocket on Henry’s shirt has almost disappeared, especially when compared to the Aurora Pro MKII and Formovie Theater Premium. In terms of the background, I think the Formovie was by far the closest to the source, but without the reference footage I’d say the Aurora Pro MKII was the most eye catching.

You can also see that in the last two scenes the PX3-Pro and Aurora Pro MKII were cropped differently and the Formovie Theater Premium and Aurora Pro 1 displayed more of the frame, especially noticeable on the right side. This behavior is probably just a setting, but it’s not a setting that I changed and from the factory they are clearly different.

In dark SDR scenes you can see that the PX3-Pro with high dynamic mode enabled prioritized black levels at the expense of highlights, which meant it not only had the dimmest overall image, but it also lost the most shadow detail. While the Formovie Theater Premium clearly had the highest black floor, it was also the only one to show this wrinkle in Henry’s sleeve, though if you check out the reference footage, I think that’s probably too much shadow detail. The PX3-Pro is the closest to the reference, while to me, the Aurora Pro MKII was the most eye catching with a good mix of bright highlights and dark shadows. The same is basically true later in the scene where the Formovie Theater Premium had raised black levels with a ton of shadow detail, the Aurora Pro MKII was the most eye catching image, and the Hisense PX3-Pro was the dimmest with the lowest black floor and also the closest to the reference material.

Overall for SDR content, the PX3-Pro was the most true to the source in terms of color accuracy but crushed some shadow detail, the Aurora Pro MKII was consistently the most eye catching image with the most dynamic range, and the Formovie Theater Premium had the best colors in terms of saturation, but had a higher black floor and struggled to accurately represent skin tones.

Moving on to Dolby Vision content, this is Season 1 Episode 4 of Obi-Wan on Disney Plus. Dolby Vision specifically is where the Formovie Theater Premium has the biggest issues because for Dolby Vision the color space menu is unavailable. The Formovie still has a bug where it defaults to the wider BT2020 color space, even when the content should be in DCI-P3 or BT709, which results in oversaturated colors, especially reds, and there’s no way to fix it other than disabling Dolby Vision at the source.

Grabbing a frame before the lights go out the Formovie Theater Premium is definitely the most eye-catching and vibrant image, but it’s not particularly close to the source material, while the Aurora Pro MKII has both good color representation and good dynamic range and the PX3-Pro is somewhere in the middle, slightly more saturated than it should be, but not to the point of being completely wrong.

When the lights go out the Aurora Pro 1 actually did the best job with shadow detail, maintaining some of the highlights on the back wall, and the Aurora Pro 2 had the biggest brightness difference between the darkest parts of the scene and the saber strikes, but the Aurora Pro 1 and Hisense PX3-Pro were more true to the source during those bright portions. Again, you can see that the Formovie Theater Premium was just nowhere close to correct in terms of color since it’s using the wrong color space for the content, but it does look kind of cool.

The same was also true for Wakanda Forever, where the Formovie Theater Premium looked pretty neat, but was massively oversaturated, and it also had a noticeably higher black floor than the other three projectors, while the Aurora Pro MKII managed to achieve a similarly punchy image by increasing dynamic range without oversaturating colors. While I think all of the projectors darkened this scene more than it should have been, the Aurora Pro MKII was the clear front runner in terms of color accuracy, saturation, and dynamic range.

Last, looking at the infamous staircase scene from 1917, played back in forced HDR10 so I could change the color space setting on the Formovie, the Hisense PX3-Pro with high dynamic and dynamic tone mapping enabled absolutely killed it in terms of black level, shadow detail, and contrast, with the Aurora Pro MKII in second, the Aurora Pro 1 in third place, and the Formovie Theater Premium in a distant last place due to a lack of any dynamic contrast options.

For overall picture quality, all four projectors are top tier, but the PX3-Pro and Aurora Pro MKII were a cut above, with the MKII specifically excelling with Dolby Vision content, and the PX3-Pro handling HDR10 quite a bit better. I thought the Aurora Pro 1 put up an extremely solid performance with no major issues and the Formovie Theater Premium definitely has potential, but it’s crazy to me that they just pushed the first major update since release and didn’t fix the color space bug. I also think dynamic contrast is almost a requirement these days.

Dynamic Contrast Artifacts

But as I said it’s not without its faults so let me point out some of those, starting with the NexiGo Aurora Pro MKII, which uses both laser dimming and dynamic iris to achieve its 26,000:1 contrast ratio, and in most scenes, it was really effective and barely noticeable. But sometimes it just can’t figure things out and the opening of the Obi-Wan scene is a pretty good example of that. I’m going to slow down the video and pay attention to the background as the scene switches perspective. You’ll notice not only the opening and closing of the iris, but also the adjustment of the laser diodes power which leads not only to a noticeable brightness pump from the iris, but also a color shift from the laser dimming, and if you focus on any of the other projectors you won’t see those artifacts.  In the dark scene in Gemini Man, you can see some laser dimming artifacts in both the Aurora Pro 1 and MKII, but the MKII is much more severe, with some flickering instead of just a subtle dimming like on the AP1.

Occasionally the artifacts are more jarring, like the water grenade explosion from Wakanda Forever which almost looks like the MKII switched picture settings for a split second, and ideally all these artifacts can be fixed by updating the dimming and iris algorithms, but there will always be edge cases where the image processor doesn’t know exactly what to do with the scene. So, if these are the kinds of things that would totally spoil your movie watching experience, you’d probably want to turn off the dynamic iris and set the Screen Adapt Engine to Low, which still gives an excellent viewing experience without artifacts, but with a higher black floor.

Triple Laser Issues

Moving on to the Hisense PX3-Pro, which I’ve been using in my living room theater for the last six months. In terms of its high dynamic contrast mode, in the hundreds of hours that I’ve watched I’ve only noticed dimming artifacts a handful of times, and overall, I’ve been extremely happy with the PX3-Pro. But it does have one downfall that I’m becoming increasingly aware of, which is its pure RGB laser light source.

The basic concept of how a single chip DLP projector works is that there’s an array of mirrors inside the projector called a digital micromirror device and for every frame the image processor breaks up the image into red, green, and blue sub-frames then aligns each pixel mirror to correspond with one color  subframe then flashes that color and repeats those steps for red, green, and blue, and because our eyes have something called persistence of vision our brains can then combine the three subframes into a full color image. 

To make the red, green, and blue light, older projectors used lightbulbs that passed through a spinning color wheel, then we moved to RGB LED light sources and single lasers with spinning phosphor wheels, and now we have pure RGB laser light sources and hybrid light sources with RGB lasers, color wheels, and LEDs combined. The major upside to RGB lasers comes from their increased brightness and wider color gamuts, but there are some drawbacks, and if you’ll indulge me as a former biology and physics teacher, I want to talk a bit about color science, but I’ll try to make it quick.

Color Science – Observer Metamerism

You may already know that humans have three types of cone cells in our eyes that detect red, green, and blue light, but it’s not quite that simple because the red and green cones react to a lot of the same wavelengths. So, a yellow object in real life would reflect light with a wavelength of around 570 nm which would stimulate our red and green cones equally and our brains would then tell us that we were looking at the color yellow. However, on a display we can’t make real yellow since there are only red, green, and blue pixels so we trick our eyes by shining equal intensity red and green lights, which has the same effect of equally stimulating both cones, so our brains then tell us the light must be yellow instead of a mix of red and green.

If you saw an extremely intense deep red color in real life your red cones would be highly stimulated without your green cones getting stimulated at all. So, for a projector to produce a deep red like the ones on the edges of the BT2020 color space, it needs to not only be able to produce a bright red light that stimulates the red cone, but it also needs to avoid stimulating the green cone. So, lasers with really narrow distributions of wavelengths are ideal for replicating those very saturated deep colors.

However, about 1 in 12 men, including myself according to an online test, have some amount of red-green color blindness where their red detecting L-Cones have a sensitivity curve that overlaps more with the green cone. So, while I can still see a real yellow object with 570 nm light, tricking me into seeing that same yellow is a bit harder because that narrow band of red light now only activates my red cone half as much as my green cone, so instead of seeing yellow, I would actually see a more lime green color, and in fact every color involving red and green would be shifted towards the green spectrum, but if I calibrate it to look good to my eyes by raising the power of the red laser my wife and daughter think the projector looks way too red because their red cones have typical sensitivity.

Keep in mind that I have the mildest form of color blindness possible, so much so that the test that I took said my red cone sensitivity was actually within the margin of error for the test, so someone with a larger deficiency will see an even larger green shift.

Hybrid light sources like the ones in the Formovie Theater Premium, Aurora Pro 1, and Aurora Pro MKII are less prone to these issues because they combine their pure RGB lasers with a blue laser and phosphor wheel that create a bunch of secondary wavelengths. You can see that when projecting a pure white screen the PX3-Pro has a big spike for blue, a big spike for red, and then a sort of twin peak for green, but the hybrid light sources have peaks for red and green, but also a lot of other wavelengths made by the phosphors, and those secondary wavelengths do a better job with red cone stimulation regardless of color blindness. In simpler terms, a projector with a hybrid light source is more likely to look the same to multiple people than one that uses pure RGB lasers.

Focus and Clarity

Alright, with all that science stuff out of the way let’s get back to doing some more typical testing of these projectors. Starting with focus and clarity, and for this test I project this image with no keystone and dial in the center focus and then take individual pictures of each corner and zoom in on the smallest text. In this test the PX3-Pro was the best with crisp sharp focus in each corner, the Aurora Pro MKII was second which is a huge deal since corner focus was my biggest complaint with the previous generation, the Formovie Theater Premium was third with slight soft focus in the upper left, and the Aurora Pro 1 has always struggled with top left corner focus and this unit was no different, putting it in last place.

Input Lag

I also tested their input lag, which is important if you want to play video games on your projector. In general, input lag numbers under 20 ms are good for all games, between 20 ms and 50 ms is acceptable but not great, and anything above 100 ms just won’t work for gaming because the delay between pressing a button on your controller and seeing the action on screen is too long.

And at 4K60Hz the PX3-Pro, Aurora Pro 1, and Aurora Pro 2 had 17.6 ms of input lag, which is about 1 ms higher than the lowest possible single frame input lag of 16.7 ms and the Formovie theater was 1 ms higher than that at 18.3 ms total. But for 1080p120Hz the PX3-Pro was quite a bit better at 9.1 ms compared to 12.4 ms on the NexiGo AP1 and AP2, and the Formovie Theater Premium doesn’t output true 1080p120Hz and as a result the input lag numbers bounced between 30 and 45 milliseconds depending on which frames were being dropped. At 240Hz the PX3-Pro had an impressively low 4.6 ms of input lag while the NexiGo projectors had inconsistent readings between 8 ms and 12 ms indicating occasional dropped frames, and the Formovie bounced between 24 ms and 32ms. In other words, the PX3-Pro is the easy choice for gaming, and if you have the Formovie you should only use 4K60Hz because all the other refresh rates give worse performance.

3D Performance

This last big update for the Formovie Theater Premium fixed 3D compatibility. I tested each projector’s 3D performance using the 3D A Turtle’s Tale, which has some of the most extreme 3D effects of any movie available and I thought the Aurora Pro 1 had the strongest 3D effect, good eye comfort, and good color. The Aurora Pro MK2 was very similar to that with strong 3D effect and good eye comfort, but I had to significantly reduce the brightness setting to avoid blowing out highlights. The Formovie had a good 3D effect and decent eye comfort, but the colors weren’t quite right, and I wasn’t able to fix them. The Hisense 3D is still not good, and though the 3D effect works, I found it very uncomfortable to watch.

DLP Rainbows

I also tested their potential for the DLP rainbow effect using my DLP test pattern where I subjectively grade each projector’s performance relative to each other. To me there was no discernible difference between any of these four projectors, and they all had what I would call a normal or moderate amount of RBE.

Laser Speckle

Another potential issue with pure RGB lasers is laser speckle, which can look like a grainy interference pattern on the screen, especially on large single color areas. Laser speckle does tend to be a smaller issue with ultra short throw projectors since the screens they are designed to be used with do a pretty good job mitigating it. However, I’ve noticed speckle plenty of times in the last six months that I’ve been using the PX3-Pro paired with a 120” AWOL lenticular ALR screen, but the Aurora Pro 1 and Formovie Theater Premium have much less speckle due to the addition of the additional phosphor wheel, and the Aurora Pro MKII takes it one step further, adding RGB LEDs to the light path which reduces speckle even further while maintaining high color gamut coverage.

Conclusions

So, all things considered, which ultra-short throw projector is the best?

On paper, looking at brightness, picture quality, color accuracy, and input lag, the Hisense PX3-Pro still stands out as easily the best ultra-short throw projector on the market in 2025, and in the last six months using it as my main projector I’ve been extremely impressed by it, so much so that it’s hard to imagine what I’m about to say next.

I’m personally going to be switching to the Aurora Pro MKII, based almost entirely on the fact that it has a hybrid light source that’s easier for me to calibrate to look good for everyone in my family without any green or red shifts, and the fact that they’ve basically eliminated laser speckle is also a huge plus. NexiGo is also still regularly updating their firmware, so I’m hopeful that they’ll be able to get their dynamic dimming polished to the point where it can at least avoid the most jarring artifacts.

If you currently have an Aurora Pro 1 and you’re bothered by the corner focus, I think the Aurora Pro MK2 is a worthy upgrade, but other than that I thought the Aurora Pro 1 still held its own in the side-by-side testing, and is an awesome projector for the price, especially when it’s on sale.

The Formovie Theater Premium was a little disappointing for me, coming in with lower brightness and lower native contrast than the original Aurora Pro, with no dynamic dimming, buggy 120 and 240Hz output, and the inability to correctly display Dolby Vision content with the correct color space definitely doesn’t seem like a projector that should command a $2800 price tag. 

As always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have links below for all of the projectors in this video, and I do appreciate it when you use those links since as an Amazon Affiliate, I do earn a small commission on the sale at no cost to you.

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.