Hisense has put three laser projectors on sale in Australia this month: the battery-powered P1 at A$1,799, the PX4 Pro ultra short throw at A$4,499 and the C3 Ultra at A$4,999. The local launch, reported on September 28, matches the prices on Hisense Australia’s own store pages, which list all three as available now.
Two of the three are already familiar to American buyers. The P1 is not, and it is the one Hisense’s Australian managing director Kevin Ke singled out, calling it “an exciting new direction” for the company’s laser line.
The P1 is a 1080p DLP projector with an RGB laser light source, rated at 1,000 ANSI lumens and 6,000:1 contrast, and sized for images from 65 to 150 inches. It sits in a cradle stand that lets the head pivot, runs Hisense’s VIDAA smart platform, and carries a three-year warranty in Australia. The lens is optical rather than digital zoom. Hisense’s product page lists “Optical Zoom 1.0-1.3,” but the barrel printed on the official product render is more precise: a 1.3x zoom ratio covering a 1.0 to 1.3 throw ratio. At the short end that puts a 100-inch picture about 2.2 meters from the wall, which is bedroom distance.
The headline feature is the built-in battery, and the press coverage has repeated Hisense’s “up to 2.5 hours” without the condition attached. The footnote on Hisense Australia’s page supplies it: 2.5 hours of continuous video playback at 300 lumens. That is less than a third of the machine’s rated output. French coverage of the P1’s IFA debut earlier this month put the figure closer to the ground, with Clubic reporting around 45 minutes at full brightness and roughly an hour and a half at a reduced setting.
Read that way, the P1 is a mains projector that can finish an episode in the backyard, not a camping projector that can finish a film at full brightness. The distinction matters because 300 lumens is a dark-room number, and a small-screen one. It will not light the 150-inch image Hisense advertises.
French coverage also lists a 240Hz mode at 1080p with a 1ms response figure. Hisense Australia’s page mentions the VIDAA Games cloud service and the Xbox app, but not the refresh rate.
The PX4 Pro is Hisense’s ultra short throw laser cinema model: 3,500 ANSI lumens, images up to 200 inches, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and IMAX Enhanced, and a 240Hz mode at 1080p with FreeSync Premium. Its iris is behind the 6,500:1 contrast claim, and Hisense’s October firmware adds a dynamic mode for it that, as we reported, cannot run alongside the stronger rainbow reduction.
The C3 Ultra is the long-throw model, rated at 4,000 ANSI lumens and 5,000:1 with its iris lens, projecting from 65 to 300 inches on a gimbal stand with lens shift, a 2.1-channel speaker system with a built-in subwoofer, and audio tuning by Devialet. Hisense Australia’s page describes the zoom as “1.67X lossless” with a 0.9 to 1.5:1 throw ratio. That is the figure printed on the lens bezel in Hisense’s product render, and it is not the 1.6x on the American spec sheet, a discrepancy we noted when the C3 Ultra went global earlier this month. The Australian sheet is the first official Western one to use the number on the glass.
In Australia, the C3 Ultra is the most expensive of the three, A$500 above the PX4 Pro. In the United States the order flips. On September 28 Amazon sold the PX4 Pro for $3,997.97 and the C3 Ultra for $2,797.97, the same price ProjectorScreen.com charges for the C3 Ultra. An American buyer pays $1,200 more for the ultra short throw machine. An Australian pays A$500 less.
Converting the Australian prices properly makes the gap larger. Australian shelf prices include 10 percent GST; American prices do not include sales tax. Taking the GST out and converting at Monday’s rate of 1.4258 Australian dollars to the US dollar:
The comparison has a limit worth stating: the Australian figures are Hisense’s own store prices, while the American ones are what dealers and Amazon charge today, and those move. Even so, a 28 percent discount in the other direction is not a rounding effect.
The PX4 Pro’s Australian price also lines up with an older product. Hisense Australia lists the C2 Ultra, the C3 Ultra’s predecessor, at the same A$4,499. In the US the C2 Ultra sells for $2,297.97 on Amazon, a full $1,700 below the PX4 Pro. Australia prices Hisense’s portable flagship and its UST flagship as equals; the US prices the UST as a separate class of product.
This is not the first time the PX4 Pro has been cheaper outside the US. When it reached Britain it arrived at the previous year’s price, while American buyers paid about $500 more, a gap we pointed to last week in our look at how JMGO priced its Iris line as one global product. Hisense has not explained its American pricing. Import tariffs are the obvious suspect, but they would weigh on both machines, and the C3 Ultra is the cheaper of the two in the US, so they do not account for the ordering. A more plausible reading is that ultra short throw projectors in the US are priced against 100-inch televisions, where $4,000 looks modest, while a portable gimbal projector is priced against other portables.
For Australian buyers, the practical result is that the PX4 Pro is the value pick of the three by a wide margin compared with what the same machine costs elsewhere. For American buyers watching the P1, the question is whether it arrives at all, and whether Hisense will print the 300-lumen condition next to the battery claim when it does.