Sometimes, movies just hit different when watched on a big screen. If it were only a matter of "quality over quantity", watching on a phone would be the ideal experience since many modern phone screens surpass even the best TVs in picture quality. That's good and cozy, but the reality is that people are often willing to shell out much more for a larger screen, even if it's technically inferior.

Coming from a 65-inch OLED TV, I used to feel so certain that I wouldn't be able to go back to a screen without the same level of contrast and brilliance. But after experiencing the sheer difference in scale of a 100-inch screen side by side, I realized how much more it could add to the immersion, especially when watching with others. The same sounds and scenes that keep you on the edge of your seat now suddenly carry way more momentum, suffocating your field of vision with larger-than-life action.

Though if you're like me and have a wandering eye for imperfections, you may find it difficult to stay immersed if the picture quality is not up to your standards. Good projectors that offer close to TV-like quality are really expensive, but so are TVs that get close to the size range of projectors. The Valerion VisionMaster line of projectors understands these compromises and limitations and packs in the specs, features, and processing needed to provide a reference cinema experience at an extremely competitive price point.

About this review: Valerion loaned the projector tested for this review. The company had no involvement in the content of this review. Testing was conducted on firmware V0000.01.00E.O1218.

Price, availability, and specs

The Valerion VisionMaster projectors began crowdfunding on Kickstarter in October of this year, and their campaign recently ended as the highest-funded projector. The Pro 2 model lists an MSRP of $3500 on Valerion's website, with a presale currently ongoing for $3,000. Units won't begin shipping until February 2025, though backers of their Kickstarter should be receiving early access soon.

Design and hardware

Eye-catching visuals — on the outside and on the screen

In the world of electronics, long-throw projectors are perhaps some of the least attractive tech you can have in a room. Good projectors are often bulky and inconvenient to position, but the Valerion VisionMaster projectors are relatively compact with a visually striking exterior. The housing is trimmed with electroplated metal rings, which not only look dazzling but also strengthen its durability. On the sides, there's ventilation between each fin for the fans to dissipate heat, and they do so while making very little noise.

The front face remains clean and simple: a flat glossy slab with just the lens and two sensors that assist in keystone correction. The rear uses the same glass with a flap that pulls out to expose the I/O ports. On the bottom, there's a tripod threading used to ceiling-mount the projector, and an adjustable front foot that pulls out at an angle for vertical tilt. The Pro 2 projector lens also provides decent optical zoom to help alleviate projector positioning, which is great to see at this price point. Vertical lens shift, though sadly, isn't available, as it's reserved only for the Max model.

The Valerion VisionMaster uses a triple RGB laser for the light source, which produces spectacularly intense color while rated for over 25,000 hours of longevity. Like most lifestyle projectors, the VisionMaster uses a 0.47" DMD chip with rapid pixel shifting to achieve a true 4K resolution. MediaTek's MT9618 (aka Pentonic 700) powers the Google TV OS and all Valerion's image processing, enabling coveted features like Dolby Vision, dynamic HDR10 tone-mapping, AI Super Resolution, and the AV1 next-gen video codecs. In terms of performance, the SoC consists of four ARM Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 1.4 GHz, paired with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, all making for very responsive navigation and playback.

For audio, there are two 10-watt speakers onboard which work in a pinch when the projector is going portable. The sound coming out of them is pretty good, though they're not as full as some speakers I've heard coming from ultra-short throw projectors, such as the XGIMI Aura. Additionally, the direction of sound doesn't come from the projected screen, which isn't optimal for content immersion but works fine for things like music.

Valerion also includes a carrying case to help move the projector around. It's made of durable EPP foam with a snug slot for the projector, and a box which holds the remote and the power supply.

Ports and connectivity

All the A/V essentials, accessible straight from you phone

All the essential I/O ports are located on the rear flap of the Valerion VisionMaster. There's three HDMI 2.1 ports, supporting eARC for one of the outputs. For audio, there's one optical SPDIF port and a single 3.5mm headphone jack, though the HDMI eARC port should best be used for lossless passthrough. For maximum network throughput, the VisionMaster projectors allow an Ethernet connection, though if you want to go wireless, it also supports Wi-Fi 6e as well as Bluetooth 5.2. There are also two USB ports for external storage and peripherals, one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0.

Using your phone, the Valerion VisionMaster makes it painless to cast music and shows from any device. The projector supports Apple AirPlay 2, Chromecast, and Miracast — all built-in.

Menu and features

Responsive navigation and picture adjustments for all kinds of viewers

The Valerion VisionMaster runs on Android TV version 12, supporting all the mainline streaming platforms. This includes Netflix, which a handful of smart projectors lack certification for. On top of the OS, Valerion jam packs the VisionMaster with a slew of other convenient features and image processing, enhancing both the movie-watching and the UI-navigating experience.

The remote control uses a straightforward button layout with a shape and weight that feels good in my hand. Aluminum spans the front of the remote while the back is made of glossy plastic, which is great because I happen to hate the feel of all-aluminum handhelds. The buttons are nice and tactile without feeling wobbly, and they even light up after being pressed.

The quick settings shortcut and layout are some of the nicest I've used on any projector or TV. With one press of a button on the remote, a small strip pops up from the bottom, which can be customized to hide/show and reorder specific settings. Most of these options do not obstruct the view of the content, and most of the settings you'll ever need to change can be accessed from this pop-out.

To help with the initial projection setup, the VisionMaster is equipped with sensors to streamline the process. With the press of a button, the sensors can scan for a viable screen space and automatically adjust the frame and focus to match. Since the Pro 2 lens also supports optical zoom, it is capable of projecting from further back while maintaining its full resolution and light output, allowing a greater degree of positional freedom.

Having sophisticated picture tune settings is essential for the best picture quality possible, allowing for varying tastes. Many smart projectors I've used rarely offer anything but the bare minimum for image adjustments — brightness, contrast, saturation, and sometimes that'd be it. Valerion takes these settings more seriously, granting the granularity you'd expect from a traditional home theater display. For calibrators, the VisionMaster comes complete with manual controls for grayscale (2-point or 20-point), tone curve and gamut selection, and RGB CMS tuning. Luckily, many color purists might find the stock factory calibration of the VisionMaster Pro 2 sufficient, which we'll cover in a bit.

What's also impressive is the amount of subjective picture enhancements available on the Valerion VisionMaster. In the picture settings, the projector comes with tunable motion enhancement, dynamic contrast tone mapping, shadow enhancement, noise reduction, gradient smoothing, AI resolution upscaling, and SDR-to-HDR color upscaling. There's also AI scene detection, but it didn't seem to work all too well (or at all) from my testing.

Although I consider myself a video purist, I still find enabling some of these features useful. From Valerion's settings, I personally use Active Contrast (Low in SDR, disabled in HDR), Dynamic Tonemapping (HDR), Motion Enhancement (Judder 3/Blur 0), and Super Resolution. While I usually find these sorts of picture adjustments in bad taste on most TVs, Valerion's features act more like compensation for the projector's inherently limited dynamic range. The Pro 2 has good contrast for a projector, but it still pales in comparison even to an entry-level TV, especially in any room with light. With Active Contrast, the projector redistributes where the deficiencies lie: more faithful contrast through the scene's mid-gray at the expense of details near pure black and pure white. If the scene happens to be mostly dark, the algorithm detects near-black as mid-gray and prevents them from being crushed, slightly brightening and expanding the scene so that dark details remain legible.

For gaming, the VisionMaster also includes auto low-latency mode (ALLM), which can reduce input lag when the input is set to a gaming PC or a console. Valerion claims that this latency is as low as 4ms at 1080p 240Hz, or 16ms at 4K 60Hz. Gaming feels more responsive than any other projector I've used before on either configuration, though I personally feel that 60Hz isn't enough nowadays. At 240Hz, the VisionMaster feels super fluid and PC-like, but the drop in resolution is pretty obvious when viewed on such a large screen. I would have absolutely loved it if Valerion could support 4K at 120Hz, which, in my opinion, is the sweet spot.

Brightness

Abundant and uniform

While projectors typically lack pure brightness intensity, a large screen size can make up for it with total light output. A towering screen is often perceived as much brighter than usual for the same luminance compared to TV sizes. And if you're watching in the dark, which is where projectors are often situated, you can get away with much lower brightness levels.

Thankfully, the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 comes prepared for more than just dark rooms. Rated for 3000 lumens, its light output should fare well even during the day, especially if you have an ambient light-rejecting screen. Testing Valerion's claims with an X-Rite I1Display3 facing the lamp with the diffuser attached, I managed to measure a maximum of 2879 lumens in the Standard white balance, which is where the projector is brightest. With the white balance set to Warm 1, which is needed for the warmer accurate D65 white point, our projector measured 2582 lumens, a very minute difference in practice.

In terms of lamp brightness uniformity, our unit has a respectably low variance. We measured a standard deviation of 1.5%, with a maximum error of 4.3% relative to the center.

With the laser control setting, the brightness of the projector can go as low as ~30% of the peak, which is somewhat middling. For a dark room home theater reference setting, this might not be dim enough to reach the 50-nit cinema target depending on your screen gain. Using Valerion's 120-inch fresnel long-throw screen with a peak gain of 1.8 (which the company generously sent out to me), the minimum laser power still outputs a white level of about 120 nits on-axis. And if you were curious, the max laser power of the VisionMaster Pro 2 outputs up to 450 nits in the Standard white balance on Valerion's fresnel screen, which is immensely bright for a projector.

Contrast and EBL

Deeper than it seems

Projector contrast can be very fickle, as even dim ambient light can cut the image contrast in half. If you plan to use the projector in any room with light, a good ambient light-rejecting screen is often the best first investment to improve the perceived contrast of any projector. If you've already got one, or plan to strictly use the projector in a dark room, then the contrast of the projector itself comes into play.

From the spec sheet, Valerion lists the Pro 2 as having a native contrast of 4000:1, and a dynamic contrast of 15,000:1 when EBL (enhanced black level) is enabled. In its footnotes, Valerion states that the native contrast is measured under a full on/off condition, which is the first point of contention I've found with the Pro 2. When a completely pure black screen is shown, the projector switches into a lower-power lamp state, which Valerion measures against a pure white screen for its contrast figure. Despite other companies doing the same thing for their advertised contrast metrics, it's plainly misleading to list it as the native contrast of the projector.

If we measure a patch of black on the same frame with a patch of white, we get a more honest figure for the projector's contrast, sometimes called the ANSI or static contrast. I also measure at maximum laser power for the highest signal-to-noise ratio and on the Warm 1 D65 white balance to keep things standardized. For these conditions, I measured a static contrast of 1754:1, which is about one stop lower in dynamic range compared to Valerion's claim. However, this is not bad at all, and actually some of the highest you'll see on a smart projector around this price.

Moving onto dynamic contrast, the VisionMaster Pro 2 supports a dynamic laser power that can reduce the frame brightness in order to reach a darker black floor. To be clear, the maximum contrast for any single frame is still limited to the static contrast of the projector (~1750:1), while dynamic sequential contrast increases the scene-to-scene brightness range the projector can produce. Valerion calls its dynamic contrast solution EBL, or enhanced black level. With its advertised figure of 15,000:1, this means the projector's brightness should be able to drop as low as 11% for very dark scenes, sacrificing the brightness of highlights.

From my testing, EBL works well in producing deeper blacks in dominantly dark scenes. It also does a good job of adapting the tone curve across the different laser brightness levels. However, I sometimes notice flickering in some scenes as the laser level fluctuates, and there is a visible difference in white balance between them. In the initial firmware, the projector came with, enabling EBL locked the laser brightest at maximum, but an update was given to adapt the algorithm to any brightness level, which was awesome to see. However, enabling EBL at the lowest brightness was not usable since dark scenes shifted everything abundantly red.

Measuring the sequential scene-to-scene contrast, Valerion's figures for dynamic contrast are faithful. At Warm 1 on the brightest setting, I measured a value of 14,504:1, which allows for a black floor that is up to three stops darker for very dark scenes.

Color tuning and calibration

Nearly reference-level from the factory

One of the VisionMaster's main selling points is its triple pure RGB laser light source, which produces a vastly vibrant color gamut — much larger than what any high-end TV can produce. Valerion claims its projectors reach up to 110% of BT.2020, though this value is simply comparing the gamut areas rather than the overlap between BT.2020 and the projector's gamut. These spectral colors are outside the capabilities of my i1Pro2 of measuring to its rated accuracy, which I'll be using in its high-resolution mode for color measurements. Doing so, I measured the Pro 2's gamut area to be 13% larger than the area of BT.2020, which falls in line with Valerion's claims. But in terms of overlap, the laser only covers 97.8% of BT.2020, which is almost its entirety, but it does mean there are a few colors on the edge of BT.2020 that the Valerion cannot produce.

The biggest drawback of the RGB light source is that it forms visible speckles, which look like colorful noise on the projector screen. It appears similar to a screen encased in a plastic film protector and is most noticeable on light surfaces. Valerion's fresnel screen claims to reduce the speckle, which it does slightly, but it's still quite visible to my eye. Nevertheless, after a while, it's easy to ignore, and the projector's overall image quality makes the trade-off worth it.

In terms of calibration, the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 is commendable, especially in HDR. Once the light source stabilizes, the white point calibration is remarkably close to D65. However, the black point veers notably warm, tinting darker colors toward red. Sadly, the calibration controls do not allow tuning of the black point, which I'd be willing to lose a little contrast for. Tonal contrast, though, is excellent, with near-perfect accuracy for gamma 2.2, gamma 2.4, and the HDR ST.2084 curve. BT.1886 tracking is nice to see, but it appears to use Valerion's 4000:1 on/off contrast ratio for the curve tuning, which in my view is an incorrect implementation of the spec; it should instead use the static frame contrast of the light source (~1750:1).

HDR10 appears to be tuned for a peak white level of 300 nits and a black floor of about 0.17 nits. For the greatest accuracy, the laser power should be adjusted to those target values, though a higher gain screen may be necessary to achieve this. Ideally, Valerion could provide an HDR level adjustment to scale the content light levels to your desired brightness range.

Should you buy the Valerion Vision Master Pro 2?

Compared to other smart projectors I've come across, the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 is in a league of its own. While some other projectors excel in hardware or convenience, most, around $3K, lack contemporary algorithms like dynamic tone mapping or dynamic contrast to optimize their output. Dolby Vision is also the quintessential video format at the moment, and its tone mapping works wonderfully on the VisionMaster. But while its pure specs are fantastic for a projector of its kind, it falls short in black levels when compared to similarly-priced home theater powerhouses like the Epson UB5050. However, the VisionMaster Pro 2 possesses the image processing and playback functionality (usually only found on much more expensive boxes) to directly address its deficiencies. It also just happens to do many other things as well. Highly recommended.

You should buy the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 if:

• You want some of the best picture quality you can get from a projector around $3K, smart or not.
• You want a lifestyle projector with good calibration and manual tuning
• You want a projector that does not need an external streaming box to reach its full potential

You should not buy the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 if:

• You want a traditional projector with much higher contrast (e.g. from Epson or JVC)
• You're super sensitive to the laser speckle or to RBE
• You need a projector with horizontal and/or vertical lens shift