Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
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.
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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.
The days of projectors forcing you to compromise on image quality are numbered.
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.
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