JMGO will start shipping the Iris Ultra, the cheaper of its two 4K/120Hz projectors, on October 26, and it is taking preorders in the United States at $1,899 against a list price of $2,399. The machine is rated at 4,500 ISO lumens and 7,000:1 native contrast, and it keeps the feature the whole Iris line is sold on: a 4K signal at 120 frames per second, from the HDMI input to the wall. The flagship Iris Ultra Max, which we covered when its $2,999 preorders opened in August, ships a week earlier, on October 19.
The Ultra has sat on JMGO’s American store since the first week of September, but it spent IFA in the shadow of the Max, and most of the coverage since has treated the pair as one product. This week the global rollout reached the wider tech press, with Notebookcheck writing up both models and German retailers quoting euro prices. The cheaper model deserves its own look, because it is the one that changes what $2,000 buys.
Per JMGO’s product page, the Ultra runs the same processing path as the Max: two Texas Instruments DLPC8545 controllers, variable refresh rate, auto low latency mode, motion smoothing that works at 4K/120, and a hardware anti-rainbow mode for the single-chip DLP engine. Dolby Vision is supported, and so are 3D, Google TV with Netflix built in, Wi-Fi 6 and two HDMI 2.1 ports. The dual iris is also carried over, six blades in the lens and nine at the laser combiner, and so is the MALC 6.0 triple-laser light source with a rated 110 percent of BT.2020. Optical zoom and lens shift are both listed, although the Ultra’s page does not give the ranges the Max’s page does.
What $1,100 less takes away is spelled out plainly. Brightness drops from 6,500 to 4,500 ISO lumens. Native contrast drops from 10,000:1 to 7,000:1. And the Ultra loses the motorised AI gimbal that lets the Max find and fit a screen on its own. Divide the rated light by the preorder price and the cheaper machine is actually the better deal, about 2.37 lumens per dollar against 2.17 for the Max. Both come with the same preorder bundle, a floor stand or a ceiling mount plus two pairs of 3D glasses and an HDMI cable, and a two-year warranty in the US and the EU.
This is where the Ultra gets interesting. JMGO launched the same generation in China on May 11 as the N5S series, four models from 5,999 to 12,999 yuan. Chinese reviewers’ spec tables put the N5S Ultra, the step below the flagship, at 5,200 CVIA lumens and 9,000:1 native contrast for 9,999 yuan, roughly $1,486 at Sunday’s rate. It displays 4K by pixel shifting at 60Hz. In the Chinese lineup only the 12,999-yuan N5S Ultra Max runs 4K at 120Hz, and JMGO marketed it there as the only one that does.
So the Iris Ultra is not simply the Chinese Ultra with a new badge. It takes the 120Hz path that JMGO reserves for its most expensive machine at home and pairs it with a lower brightness and contrast rating than the Chinese Ultra carries. The units do not line up exactly, and as we noted with the Max, a CVIA figure has to satisfy colour-accuracy conditions that an ISO figure does not. But the direction is clear enough. In China, 120Hz costs an extra 3,000 yuan over the next model down. In the United States it starts at $1,899.
It is a sensible bet on where the buyers are. A console player in America or Europe who wants 4K/120 on a big screen has been told for years that it means a TV. JMGO has decided that audience matters more abroad than the extra lumens do, and built a model for it that it does not bother to sell at home.
The EU store lists the Ultra at €1,999, down from €2,499, and the Max at €2,999, down from €3,499. European shelf prices include VAT and American ones do not, so the euro figures look higher than they are. Take Germany’s 19 percent out and convert at Sunday’s rate, and the Ultra’s preorder price comes to about $1,914 and its list price to about $2,393, within a few dollars of the American $1,899 and $2,399. The Max works out to about $2,872 before tax, roughly $127 below its American preorder price, and its list price to about $3,351, around $148 under the US list.
That is unusually even. The last few Chinese projectors to cross the Atlantic have arrived with regional gaps of several hundred dollars, and Hisense’s PX4 Pro reached Britain at last year’s price while Americans paid $500 more. JMGO has priced the Iris line as a single global product, and the cheaper model most of all.
The timing also helps. XGIMI’s HORIZON 20 Pro, the most direct rival at this price, sold for $1,619 on Amazon on September 18. This week it is back at $1,999. It is rated at 4,100 ISO lumens with optical zoom and lens shift, and XGIMI’s own spec page lists its fastest modes as 1080p at 240Hz and 1080p at 120Hz, with 4K topping out at 60Hz. On paper the Iris Ultra now undercuts it by $100 while claiming 400 more lumens and double the 4K frame rate. The HORIZON 20 Pro still has independent reviews behind it and is available today, which counts for a lot when the alternative is a preorder.
Further down, Dangbei’s MP1 Max holds at $1,299 on Amazon with a 4.4-star rating across 93 reviews. It is rated at 3,100 ISO lumens and makes less noise than either, under 24dB in its standard mode, and at $600 below the Iris Ultra it leaves room in the budget for a proper ALR screen. For a living room used mainly for films, that trade is easy to make, as our MP1 Max and HORIZON 20 Pro comparison worked through. The Iris Ultra’s case rests almost entirely on the gamer who cares about 120Hz at 4K, a buyer our gaming projector list had to send to 1080p modes until now.
Nobody has measured either Iris model yet. No lab has published brightness, contrast or input lag for the Ultra or the Max, and JMGO has not given a latency figure for 4K/120 on either page. JMGO’s own Ultra page does not quite agree with itself on timing either: the banner above the buy button says orders ship between October 19 and October 25, while the FAQ below it gives October 26 as the start date for the Ultra. A month from now there should be a meter reading and a delivery date to hold both claims against.