// WIRED US/UK — HARDWARE & GADGET
Valerion VisionMaster Max 4K Projector Review: Looks Great, Sounds OK
Valerion’s VisionMaster Kickstarter campaign raised more than $8 million in 2024, making it the most-funded campaign on the platform that year. After spending the past few weeks with the flagship VisionMaster Max, I’m confident there are plenty of satisfied backers.
At $3,999, it costs far more than excellent point-and-play rivals, such as the Nebula X1 (9/10 WIRED Recommends), but considerably less than native 4K home-theater projectors from brands like Sony and JVC. That leaves the Max straddling two very different camps.
Its compact design, built-in Google TV, and automated setup suggest the classification of a premium lifestyle projector, while optical zoom, vertical lens shift, a mechanical iris, and sophisticated black-level processing point toward something far more capable. It’s easy to use and almost too pretty to ceiling-mount, but arguably too sophisticated to spend its life propped up on a side table. So the question remains: Who is the VisionMaster Max actually for?
The 16.5-pound VisionMaster Max is simple to get up and running. Google TV grants instant access to many streaming services, while auto-keystone and autofocus make positioning a frictionless process. (However, because keystone correction digitally reshapes the image, when used heavily, it can reduce resolution—but that's true for all devices with the feature.) Optical zoom, with a 0.9 to 1.5:1 throw ratio, lets you resize the picture without moving the projector. There's also vertical lens shift, which moves the image up or down without needing to resort to digital correction. All of this means that if you’ve got a blank wall and five minutes, you can stream Emily in Paris on a 90-inch screen in no time.
It’s clever tech, though not fully unique, with the XGIMI Horizon range and Nebula X1 offering similar optical-image manipulation. Even so, the VisionMaster Max offers considerably more control than most point-and-play designs. Praise is also due for the remote, which looks and feels great. Many brands scrimp on details like accessories, but Valerion maintains its premium feel throughout.
The VisionMaster Max produces a seriously bright image. Its 3,500 ISO lumen RGB triple-laser light source easily projected a 75-inch picture I could happily watch during the day in a bright room. Valerion says it’s good for images between 40 and 300 inches. I maxed out at 130 inches but was impressed by how even the detail remained right to the edges at that size.
While I watched during the day, the colors appeared a bit washed out in this environment, but much less so than I expected. Once I watched in the dark, however, I enjoyed punchy high-dynamic-range (HDR) highlights, excellent detail, and smooth motion.
In terms of color, the Max has 110 percent Rec.2020 coverage, meaning the lasers can reproduce an exceptionally wide range of colors, far exceeding the needs for ultra-high-definition (UHD) and HDR video. In my living room, colors looked rich without becoming cartoonish, while the combination of brightness, detail, and contrast gave movies cinematic quality.
Black levels with most home projectors are good, but not brilliant. Here, however, the proprietary six-stage iris self-adjusts the aperture from scene to scene, closing for darker images to deepen blacks, and opening up when a scene calls for more brightness. Enhanced Black Level (EBL) works alongside the iris, electronically reducing laser output in darker scenes, adjusting the image curve to maintain details. Together, these features dramatically reduce the charcoal-gray blacks common with this type of projector. I was astonished by the depth and shadow detail it produced without losing brighter details. Even the film The Dark Knight, with its muted color grading, looked good.
Though I didn't put the VisionMaster Max through its paces for video-game testing (I’m not much of a gamer, unless you count Mario Kart battles on the Nintendo Switch), the projector's specifications are nonetheless impress