Unleash the Valerion Pro 2 – Full Picture Settings and Setup Guide
June 13, 2025I’ve spent hundreds of hours testing and reviewing projectors and one thing most people don’t realize is that having the right picture settings is just as important as the quality of the projector. So, over the next few months I’ll be making a series of videos explaining how to adjust the picture settings on my most recommended projectors, starting today with the Valerion Pro 2.
Even before you turn the projector on, you have an important decision to make because you may know that the Valerion has a 1.6x optical zoom, meaning it can project a 100” screen from anywhere between 80” and 130”. But what you might not know is that having the projector close to the screen at its minimum throw ratio will cause the image to be about 7-8% brighter, but having the projector farther away at is maximum throw ratio results in a significant increase in contrast of between 25% and 35%, which is a great tradeoff for less than 10% decrease in brightness. So, my recommendation is to always use the Valerion Pro 2 at its maximum throw ratio if your room allows for it.
Next, if you’re planning on using an external source like an AppleTV or FireTV, you should plug it into either HDMI 1 or HDMI 2 which are the two HDMI 2.1 ports on the Valerion, while HDMI 3 only supports HDMI 2.0 and is also designated as the eARC port for sending audio from your projector’s built-in apps back to a soundbar or AV receiver.
Once you’ve got the Valerion powered on, before you adjust any picture settings, I’d also recommend going to All Settings > System > About > System update to make sure you are on the latest firmware from Valerion.
After you’ve done that it’s time to start adjusting picture settings. The first thing to know is that you’re going to have four different sets of picture options depending on whether the content you’re watching is in SDR, HDR, HDR10+, or Dolby Vision, and in order to access those settings you need to be playing that content type.
Starting with SDR picture settings, there are two different ways to access settings using the Valerion remote. The first is by pressing the gear icon, which brings up the GoogleTV settings dialog and from there you can either choose All Settings or jump directly to Picture Options.
But my preferred method for accessing the settings is to use the hamburger button on the remote to access the configurable quick access menu, and if you scroll all the way to the right, you can edit which specific menus you want to have access to. I personally use Picture Mode, Game Settings, Picture, 3D, and Game Bar on my quick access menu.
Picture Mode lets you toggle between different presets. I personally set up three different modes: Theater for watching movies and TV shows, Sports for sports, and PC/Game for video games. But where we’re going to spend most of our time is in the picture menu, where the first option is to select which preset you are modifying, and the second determines whether you are modifying this preset across all three HDMI ports and the native Google TV apps, or whether you just want these picture options to apply to the current HDMI source.
Under General you’ve got three options for content type: Auto Detection, which will automatically switch picture modes to filmmaker or IMAX for certain content, and I personally leave that off, Auto Picture Mode, which I also leave off, and AI Scene, which to be honest, I don’t see any difference whether it’s on or off, so I just leave it off.
Next, we’re going to temporarily skip over the Laser Luminance menu to go into Color. This is where you’ll set your projector’s color temperature. For most people you’re going to want to either choose Warm1 or Warm2 depending on what looks right to you. From a purely color accuracy standpoint, Warm1 is almost exactly perfect D65 white point when measured with an $8000 spectroradiometer, but Warm2 may look more accurate to you if your eyes aren’t as sensitive to red.
The next option is Color Space, and 99.9% of the time you’ll want to set this to Auto, which will use whatever color space the content says it should, and forcing a color space is very likely to ruin your projector’s color accuracy by massively oversaturating reds, greens, and blues.
The last menu option here is Dynamic Color Enhancer, which I’ve found also negatively impacts color accuracy, so I leave it off.
Let’s move back up to Laser Luminance, which has all of the most important options. In this menu the first option is Laser Luminance, which controls how bright the projected image is. I personally like to watch movies in a room with a small amount of ambient bias lighting, and I prefer the brightest image possible, but if you’re watching in a completely dark room or if you’re experiencing eye fatigue, you may want to turn down the laser and to do that, you’ll need to temporarily turn off EBL.
I did check and running a lower laser power doesn’t seem to affect the native or dynamic contrast of the Valerion, so feel free to change this setting without fear of messing up picture quality. But new in the most recent firmware, setting a laser power lower than 5 will automatically disable Enhanced Black Level, so I’d recommend using at least 5.
The next option is EBL, which stands for Enhanced Black Level, and it’s Valerion’s version of Laser Dimming. The effectiveness of EBL is basically what sets the Valerion apart from every other projector on the market. If you set EBL to High Dynamic Range the Valerion will attempt to use laser dimming in every scene, dynamically adjusting laser power to get the deepest black levels possible while maintaining bright highlights. If you set it to Dark Level Enhancement, EBL will only activate during darker scenes, and if you set it to off, the Valerion won’t use any laser dimming and you’ll be limited to only the native contrast ratio, which is around 1600:1.
The upside to EBL is obviously a massively increased contrast ratio, up to about 12,000:1, but the tradeoff is occasional flickering caused by quick laser power adjustments and color shifting, usually towards red as each of the individual laser diodes has to independently adjust. I personally recommend setting EBL to High Dynamic Range, but if those tradeoffs are too much, you should try EBL on Dark Level Enhancement, and if you still can’t handle the occasional dynamic dimming artifacts, the Valerion probably isn’t the right projector for you because turning EBL off gets rid of its biggest strength.
Next, we’re going to skip over contrast and black level for now, to talk about Dark Detail, Gamma, and Active Contrast, which all do very similar things, starting with the broadest adjustment which is Gamma.
The Valerion lets you set Gamma values of 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 and BT.1886. Using a lower number like 2.0 will flatten the dynamic range, which will increase the brightness in dark areas compared to a larger number like 2.4 where shadowy areas will be very dark. There is no right or wrong gamma setting, but in general if you are watching your projector in a bright room, you should choose 2.0, if you have a small amount of ambient light then 2.2 should work well, and in a completely blacked out theater room 2.4 and BT.1886 may be viable options. But I personally don’t use them since they make it harder to see details in shadowy areas.
Dark Detail is a sort of intelligent selective gamma adjustment that looks for shadowy areas of the image and brightens any lighter values within that area to provide more contrast and make details easier to see. In theory this is a great option, but depending on the quality of your content it can make digital noise and streaming artifacts more visible.
Active Contrast takes that intelligent selective gamma one step further and applies it to the entire image rather than just the darkest areas, and for every frame Active Contrast will brighten the highlights and reduce the brightness of the shadows to try to use the entire dynamic range of the projector. Confusingly these are labeled “Low,” “Medium,” and “High,” but in SDR the Low setting has the largest effect on the image, Medium has the least effect, and High is somewhere in the middle, and I personally prefer to have Active Contrast on Medium.
Once you’ve settled on some combination of Gamma, Dark Detail and Active Contrast, you can then go back and adjust contrast and black level.
Black Level has traditionally been called brightness on most displays and I’m happy about the name change since the setting determines the point where a pixel should be completely black, and setting the black level above zero will brighten up all the shadows but will raise the projector’s overall black level, while setting it to a negative value will make sure that you are getting the darkest black levels possible, but will result in crushed shadow detail if you move it too far down.
I like to use the warehouse scene in Wakanda Forever for all of my adjustments and make sure that shadow details are visible, but that the darkest parts of the scene are as dark as the black bars on the bottom and top of the image.
Contrast is basically the opposite of Black Level and could be renamed to white level. It determines the point at which a pixel should be completely white. Setting the contrast too high will cause highlights to be blown out where areas that are supposed to have detail will appear white instead and setting it too low can make the image look dull and flat. I like to use this explosion from Wakanda Forever to adjust contrast to the point where the detail in the flames starts to go away, and then I step it back until the detail reappears.
There are dedicated test patterns for setting brightness and contrast, or black level and white level if that’s what you want to call them, but I’ve found that if you’re using more dynamic options like Dark Detail and Active Contrast that you really need to set those values using actual content.
The last three options are Brightness Enhancer, which you should leave off for everything but watching 3D content, HDMI Dynamic Range, which you should leave on Auto, and HDR Enhancer, which might be worth using if you’ve decided to turn off Active Contrast. But I personally prefer Active Contrast on Medium rather than having HDR Enhancer on.
Moving into the Clarity menu, Sharpness is usually a setting I recommend keeping as low as possible since it adds artificial white outlines around high contrast areas, but the default value of 7 does appear to add some additional clarity without being distracting.
Smooth Gradient prevents color banding in large areas where there is a gradual shift in color by artificially adding greater color depth, and I think the low setting works surprisingly well without any unwanted consequences.
Super Resolution is supposed to increase definition, but in my experience, it adds a lot of unwanted artifacts, so I leave it off.
Noise Reduction and MPEG Noise Reduction both try to hide some of the speckling that can be seen on DLP projectors, but both of them have the unwanted side effect of smearing motion in dark scenes, so I’d suggest leaving them off.
Last, Motion Enhancement is sometimes called MEMC, TruMotion, or Frame Interpolation, but they all work by generating extra frames in between low framerate content to make the motion appear smoother. The issue is that the extra frames aren’t real, and the image processor is just guessing what was supposed to happen in between two points, so sometimes it can generate strange artifacts. Even worse than that, making low framerate content into high framerate content causes the soap opera effect which makes everything look hyper realistic instead of cinematic by hiding motion blur.
However, motion blur is really hard for a DLP projector with instant pixel response time to display correctly, and as a result you get motion stutter, which makes smooth panning motion look choppy.
Thankfully, the Valerion has a custom Motion Enhancement setting which lets you individually dial in the two different aspects of Motion Enhancement, which are judder reduction and blur reduction. But to me they seem like they are possibly reversed in their effect, and increasing Judder reduction leads to a greater soap opera effect, while increasing blur reduction makes it more likely that you’ll see motion artifacts, especially on moving text and credits. For me, the sweet spot is Judder Reduction 1, Blur Reduction 5, but I’d recommend increasing Judder Reduction as far as you can until you start to notice the soap opera effect, and then back it off one level.
The last menu is Calibration Settings, and to be honest, I don’t think you should really try to mess with these settings unless you have a colorimeter or a reference monitor to compare to because even small changes can really mess up color accuracy.
So, to wrap up SDR, there are no “wrong” settings here, and you should really set up your projector to what looks best to you, but here are my preferred settings for watching movies in SDR using an AppleTV as my source.
Here are my settings for watching sports in SDR, with the main difference being the color temperature, which I set to the slightly cooler Warm2 white point, and Motion Enhancement, which I set for maximum clarity since cinematic motion blur isn’t something you want to see in a football game.
If you’re watching HDR content, all the menus are mostly the same except inside of the Laser Luminance menu the Gamma value is locked to something called ST2084 which aims to give the biggest differences between the darkest and brightest areas but can cause moderately lit areas to look a little flat. The most important option for HDR is Dynamic Tone Mapping, which will map the dynamic range of your content to a level that your projector can actually produce, and you absolutely want to have this option on, otherwise you’ll see massively blown out highlights in every bright scene.
Again, there are no wrong settings here, but this is what I use for HDR content.
Last, Dolby Vision has all of the same options, plus one sneaky one. Even though the Gamma option is locked at 2.2, if you go to All Settings > Display and Sound > Screen > Screen Size, you’ll find that adjusting the screen size between 80” and 150” is almost exactly like adjusting the Gamma in SDR content, and a screen size of 150” is very similar to a 2.0 gamma with brighter shadows, 100” is like 2.2 gamma, and 80” is more like 2.4 gamma with the darkest shadows which is most suitable for a completely light controlled room.
Here are my preferred settings for Dolby Vision content.
So now that we’ve covered movies and sports, let’s talk gaming. As of right now there are no projectors outside of China that support VRR, and no DLP projectors that support 4K120Hz, but the Valerion does support 4K60Hz, 1080p120Hz, and 1080p240Hz with very low input lag and no motion blur, which makes it an excellent option for competitive gaming. But using the wrong settings can drastically increase input lag, and some of the settings are a bit hidden and counterintuitive.
Starting with 4K60Hz gaming like you’d have on the new Nintendo Switch 2 in docked mode, if you just use a standard picture mode like SDR theater the input lag will be around 138 ms, which is not good. However, just switching the picture mode to PC/Game reduces input lag to 34.3 ms, which is totally usable. The best thing about this option is you can still use digital keystone while maintaining that same input lag.
However, if you want to reduce it to near single frame input lag you need to also go to All Settings > Projector and scroll all the way down to DLP Turbo Mode which disables keystone and most advanced image processing in favor of the lowest input lag and gets it down to 17.6 ms which is excellent.
If you want to use a higher refresh rate like 1080p120Hz you can achieve input lag numbers as low as 12.1 ms by activating PC/Game Mode, DLP Turbo Mode, and High Refresh Rate Mode which is found in Game Settings, and at 1080p120Hz the Valerion can also do 20.5 ms of input lag while using keystone by activating PC/Game Mode and High Refresh Rate Mode.
At 1080p240Hz the minimum input lag is 4.6 ms in PC/Game mode with DLP Turbo and High Refresh Rate Mode on. Turning off Turbo Mode lets you use digital keystone while still maintaining impressively low input lag at 8.7 ms.
A word of caution. If you accidentally toggle on High Refresh Rate mode when using 4K60Hz you will inadvertently ruin your gaming performance increasing the input lag to 42.6 ms.
Last, there are a few more random settings that you probably shouldn’t touch.
In All Settings > Projector you’ll find Ultra Sharp Mode that controls the Valerion’s pixel shifting motor. Disabling that setting will cause the Valerion to output its native 1080p which can be useful for dialing in focus, but not much beyond that, so keep it enabled.
I’ve seen a lot of people suggesting that it’s better to leave DLP Turbo Mode on all the time, but in my experience, it tends to increase DLP rainbow effect, so I’d personally recommend leaving it off unless you specifically need the extra gaming performance.
And that just about covers all the relevant options that you should be changing on your Valerion Pro 2. As firmware updates happen and options change, I’ll try to update the pinned comment. If I missed a setting that you’re wondering about, make sure to let me know in the comments. If this was helpful to you consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and as always, thanks for watching The Hook Up.