You are rapidly running out of reasons to not get yourself a projector

I feel like a lot of people follow a similar journey when it comes to projectors. They’re initially wowed by the allure of a giant picture, bringing the cinema experience home. And maybe they’re also intrigued by the flexibility of being able to set things up at a moment’s notice wherever there’s a blank wall. But then the reality of the tech quickly sets in.

For all the promise they offer, projectors have been plagued since day one by compromise after compromise — they may deliver big-screen thrills, but at what cost? Maybe you’ve been let down by poor brightness, resulting in a washed-out picture, or distracting rainbow effects from the way they cycle colors. But the good news is that things have been getting a lot, LOT better, and even as a long-time skeptic, I found myself getting on board a couple years ago, as the positives finally started outweighing the negatives.

There’s still work to be done to further close that gap, but this year at IFA 2025 in Berlin, I’m getting to check out some of the latest progress companies have been making to solve those remaining projector problems. And one of my favorite advancements comes from XGIMI and its line of Horizon 20 projectors.

Even though modern projectors can be fantastically portable, oftentimes we’re limited in where we’re able to place them due to factors like room layout or furniture placement. And because that doesn’t always mean we’re able to nicely point them straight at a wall, projectors employ fancy digital tricks like keystoning to shape their output to accommodate.

Digital image resizing solutions like object avoidance and keystoning use software to change the shape of the image being projected, so that when it hits your wall at an angle, the picture looks nice and square again, or it doesn’t end up overlapping with that annoyingly placed light switch.

The huge problem with this, though, is that you’re starting with a finite number of pixels to begin with — and only so much light available to illuminate them — so digitally changing the shape of the projector’s output inherently means cropping things down and not using all those pixels, resulting in a softer, dimmer image.

It’s a trade-off we’ve lived with so far, as the convenience overcomes the downsides for many of us. But maybe we don’t have to.

If you’re looking for the best possible output from a projector, one big trick is to do as much as possible optically, taking advantage of high-quality lenses, rather than leaning on digital processing. XGIMI already made me a fan of this approach with the optical zoom on the company’s earlier Horizon Ultra, supporting rooms of many different sizes without impacting image quality.

With the new Horizon 20 series this year (the Horizon 20, 20 Pro, and 20 Max — the difference between them basically just being maximum brightness), XGIMI upgrades that optical zoom to also offer lens shifting. Instead of the projector always beaming its picture out straight ahead, this new optical system allows you to shift the image up, down, left, and right, all without needing to crop into the edge at all, retaining full resolution and brightness.

That is a HUGE advancement in my mind, and combined with optical zoom, XGIMI projectors can now offer the same sort of flexibility with hardware placement as they did before, but without the kind of downsides that have so far been inevitabilities.

Just because this is a new feature doesn’t mean it’s being implemented in a half-finished way, either, and I was particularly impressed with the UI XGIMI has come up with for adjusting lens shift.

Rather than leaving you guessing as to just what your options look like, a detailed on-screen interface clearly shows what’s possible, letting you use the projector’s remote to shift around its screen output within the range of that gray circle — again, with no cropping or reduction of image quality.

It’s not quite a full-on replacement for digital keystone correction, as that offers support for extreme angles unachievable by this optical system, but for situations where you can still point your projector directly at the wall but need to move its output a bit off-center, this is the ideal solution. Seeing it comes to reasonably priced home projectors like the Horizon 20 series gives me hope that this is far from the last high-quality optical answer to a digital problem that will help elevate projectors from big-screen treats to devices that are as commonplace as traditional TV screens.