Two 4K laser projectors from Chinese brands are now $320 apart on Amazon, and the gap is doing more work than it looks. The Dangbei MP1 Max was selling for $1,299 this week, down from the $1,599 Dangbei charges in its own US store. The XGIMI HORIZON 20 Pro was $1,619, the same price XGIMI’s own store asks, against a $2,499 list price nobody has paid for a while.
At those numbers the XGIMI costs about 25 percent more and is rated about 32 percent brighter, 4,100 ISO lumens to 3,100. Divide it out and the two are almost level on brightness per dollar, 2.5 lumens for the XGIMI and 2.4 for the Dangbei. So the choice is not really about light output per dollar. It is about the things each company chose to spend the rest of its budget on, and they chose very differently.
Both use Texas Instruments’ 0.47-inch DMD to produce a 4K image, both run Google TV with a licensed Netflix app, both have two HDMI inputs with eARC on one of them, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 and a pair of 12-watt speakers. Neither has a battery. On a spec sheet laid side by side, half the rows match.
The light source is where they part. The XGIMI uses a pure RGB triple laser, red, green and blue lasers with nothing else in the path. The Dangbei uses what it calls a hybrid engine, triple laser plus LED, which Dangbei credits with better colour saturation, the ability to address what it calls “traditional laser limitations”, and filtering of the 400 to 445 nanometre band of blue light that eye-comfort marketing tends to single out.
XGIMI, to its credit, is unusually frank about the trade-off on its own side. Its Amazon listing carries a line most brands leave out: triple laser technology “may cause slight speckle or faint RBE visual effect” for roughly 5 to 10 percent of viewers with sensitive eyes, and the company suggests an ALR screen and a seat more than nine feet back. Speckle is the fine, shimmering grain that pure laser light can produce on a matte surface, and RBE is the rainbow effect that single-chip DLP can show during fast eye movement. The Dangbei listing carries no equivalent warning. That does not prove nobody will ever see speckle on it, but a hybrid engine is the design that exists precisely so fewer people do.
The most useful difference for anyone putting a projector into an existing living room is placement. The HORIZON 20 Pro has a 1.2 to 1.5:1 optical zoom and optical lens shift, rated at plus or minus 120 percent vertically and 45 percent horizontally. That means it can sit on a shelf off to one side or well below the screen and put a properly rectangular image where you want it, without the digital keystone correction that throws away pixels.
The MP1 Max answers the same problem with its body. It sits in an integrated stand that turns through 360 degrees horizontally and tilts through 135 degrees, then leans on Dangbei’s InstanPro automatic focus, keystone, screen fitting and obstacle avoidance to square the picture up afterwards. For a projector that lives on a coffee table and gets pointed at the wall on Friday and the ceiling on Sunday, that is the more flexible arrangement. For a projector that will be set up once in front of a screen and left there, the XGIMI’s optics are the cleaner answer.
Dangbei does build optical lens shift. It just keeps it at home. The X9 Max that went on sale in China this week carries a ±135 percent vertical shift, wider than the XGIMI’s, but nothing in Dangbei’s US catalogue has one.
Dangbei rates the MP1 Max at under 24dB in its standard mode. XGIMI rates the HORIZON 20 Pro at up to 28dB. Four decibels is not a spec-sheet rounding error; in a quiet room at night it is the difference between a fan you notice when the film goes silent and one you mostly do not. The Dangbei is heavier, 5.6kg against 4.9kg, which is the stand talking.
The XGIMI takes back ground elsewhere. It supports Dolby Vision and IMAX Enhanced, where the Dangbei’s HDR list is HDR10+, HDR10 and HLG. It has 4GB of memory. And it is the better games machine on paper, with a 240Hz mode, a claimed 1ms response, VRR and ALLM. The MP1 Max answers with 3D support across side-by-side, top-and-bottom and Blu-ray 3D, which is a smaller audience but one that has very few new projectors left to buy.
On Amazon the two have near-identical standing with buyers, 4.4 stars from 93 ratings for the Dangbei and 4.3 from 94 for the XGIMI, which at those sample sizes says only that neither has a problem showing up in the reviews.
The curious part of the price comparison is on Dangbei’s side. Amazon’s $1,299 is the price Android Authority flagged on Monday as a $300 cut from a $1,599 recommended price, and $1,599 is exactly what Dangbei’s own store still charges, itself shown as a markdown from $1,999. XGIMI, by contrast, has aligned its two channels to the dollar. Anyone buying the MP1 Max direct this week is paying $300 more than they need to, and nothing on the Amazon listing tells them so.
That also moves the MP1 Max below a line that matters. At $1,299 it is the cheapest projector in this pair by a margin large enough to buy a decent ALR screen, and at 3,100 ISO lumens it is bright enough to fill one at 120 inches in a room with the lights down. The full spec comparison lays out the rest line by line, and our earlier look at the MP1 Max against XGIMI’s Horizon S Max covers the previous round of this rivalry.
Buy the HORIZON 20 Pro if the projector is going on a shelf or a rear table in a room you have already arranged, if you game on a console at high frame rates, or if Dolby Vision is on your list. Buy the MP1 Max if it will move, if it needs to be quiet, or if the $320 is better spent on a screen. At this week’s prices, for most living rooms that do not already have a projector shelf, that is the Dangbei.