The XGIMI Horizon shares a lot of the internals with its 4K capable Pro sibling, as such you get the same weight, size, controls OS and shape. To the end user, that means a cube design that is compact and well built with excellent sounding speakers. While they may not blow your socks off in the low Hz range, they are still great for clarity and round up the viewing experience. Thanks to the Android TV 10 OS, you get all the usual features with functionality dictated by the fact that this is a projector added on top in a useful fashion.

In terms of picture quality, let's just start by saying that it looks great in general & while it is watchable during the day, it does hit limits in terms of brightness. With the HDR setting, that is enabled out of the box, you loose some more general brightness in favor of color saturation, which pushes the XGIMI Horizon over the line when the room is well lit. As such, one should just turn that off if daytime viewing is something you plan to do.

But, let's talk about the elephant in the room. XGIMI advertises 2200 ANSI Lumens for the Horizon. In our standardized testing, we got around 75% of that value - which is still very good. However, similar priced 1080p LED projectors can't match the advertised number, while their more realistic tested values tend to be far closer to their marketed ones and end up being quite similar to what the XGIMI Horizon actually manages to deliver. So, even while XGIMI does their own testing, utilizing ISO standards to do so, their marketing is really stretching reality to communicate that larger number. As brightness is by far the biggest attribute when it comes to make a buying decision for a projector, this is not a consumer friendly approach and no matter how well the unit works, XGIMI needs to be called out. To make matters a bit worse, their testing is done in a mode that is not meant to be used by consumers, which means you loose another 10% brightness if you stick to appropriate long-term approved settings.

On the flip-side, and the one saving grace in this regard, is the fact that the real world numbers we got in our testing at around 1550-1650 ANSI Lumens are still very good for a 1080p LED Android TV based projector in this price range. In combination with the fact that the XGIMI Horizon is still competitively priced at or below that of the competitors in the 1600 ANSI Lumens class also helps a great deal. So in the end, the XGIMI Horizon manages to deliver a good price and performance standard for its class.

Couple that with the excellent auto-focus and keystone functionality, excellent build quality and general user experience, the crazy thing is, that the Horizon still performs in a really recommendable fashion. So XGIMI could and should just stick to realistic numbers in their marketing and still take the win - let's hope they are more mindful of that in the future. Long story short: don't buy the XGIMI Horizon if you are thinking you will get a 2000+ ANSI Lumens for a steal - really don't. But, as frustrating as it may seem, if you are eyeing 1080p LED Android based projectors at sub-$1000 prices, then you will quickly notice products max out at 1600 ANSI Lumens on paper - so after all that, the Horizon still manages to be a worthy recommendation.