JMGO has opened United States preorders for the Iris Ultra Max, a 4K projector the company rates at up to 6,500 ISO lumens and 10,000:1 native contrast, at 2,999 dollars. The price after the preorder window closes is 3,499 dollars, and the first units are scheduled to ship on October 19. The listing went live on JMGO’s American store on August 28, a week before IFA opens in Berlin on September 4, and the machine will be on the floor there.
The number JMGO wants in the headline is not the brightness. It is the refresh rate. The Iris series is being sold as the first smart projector line to run 4K at a native 120Hz, and the rest of the machine is arranged around that: HDMI 2.1 inputs, variable refresh rate and auto low latency mode, and Dolby Vision that stays available at 4K/120 rather than dropping out above 60. Everything else reads like a flagship. A triple-laser MALC 6.0 engine, 0.88 to 1.7:1 optical zoom that reaches a 300-inch image, four-way optical lens shift at 130 percent vertical and 53 percent horizontal, a motorised gimbal base with automatic screen alignment, Netflix and Prime Video on board rather than on a stick, and a claimed 26dB of fan noise.
Fifteen blades in front of the light
The series name is doing real work, and it is worth unpacking, because an iris on a projector normally means one thing and here it means two. JMGO puts an aperture inside the lens and a second one at the point where the three laser channels are combined: six blades in one, nine in the other, fifteen in total, stepped through six positions. The lens barrel is printed F2.0-7.0, which is the range those blades cover.
Two apertures on two parts of the optical path is a mechanical answer to a mechanical problem. Scattered light bouncing around inside the barrel is what lifts the black floor on a laser projector, and choking it at two points catches more of it than choking it at one. JMGO puts the improvement at 11.34 percent better stray-light suppression and the result at 10,000:1 native, which it describes as the highest figure in the lifestyle category. XGIMI reached the same design conclusion this year with the dual-iris Titan Noir, a machine that arrives in Japan this month with its price still blank. Two of China’s three largest projector brands now believe the way to win a contrast argument is to add moving parts, which is not where the industry was looking five years ago.
The same optics sell in China for 12,999 yuan
JMGO already sells this machine at home. It is called the N5S Ultra Max there, it launched in the spring, and the optical figures line up field for field with the Iris Ultra Max: the same 0.47-inch DLP472TP chip, the same dual aperture running F2.0 to F7.0, the same 10,000:1 native rating, the same 0.88 to 1.7:1 throw range and 1.93x optical zoom, the same 130 percent vertical and 53 percent horizontal lens shift. The German site 4KFilme, which previewed the Iris Ultra Max on August 24 before the American listing appeared, matched the two the same way. Photographs of the Chinese unit show a lens ring printed with identical aperture and zoom markings.
The Chinese price is 12,999 yuan. At Monday’s rate of 6.74 yuan to the dollar that is about 1,930 dollars. The American preorder sits 55 percent above it and the American list price 81 percent above it.
Some of that spread is cost rather than margin. A projector sold in the United States carries import duty, a licensed Google TV build, Netflix and Prime Video certification the domestic Chinese firmware does not need, a US warranty, and a returns rate that a thirty-day money-back policy makes expensive. None of that is free. But 1,069 dollars of preorder spread on a machine whose optical bill of materials appears identical is worth saying out loud, because the gap is not mentioned anywhere on the American page, and it is the same pattern that turned up when a Hisense ultra short throw reached Britain at last year’s price while Americans paid 500 dollars more.
5,600 in one market, 6,500 in the other
The brightness ratings do not match, and that is the more interesting discrepancy. In China the machine is rated 5,600 CVIA lumens. In the United States it is rated up to 6,500 ISO lumens. Nothing in either description points at a different light engine, and JMGO names the same MALC 6.0 triple-laser system on both sides.
The two units are not the same unit. CVIA lumens come from a standard written by the China Video Industry Association; ISO lumens come from ISO 21118. Both average nine measurement points across the image, the way ANSI lumens always have, and both require production samples to reach at least 80 percent of the rated figure. The difference is what else the CVIA number has to satisfy. It has to be produced with colour temperature inside a defined window and colour deviation held under a Duv of 0.015. ISO 21118 sets no colour requirement at all, which means an ISO figure can legitimately be taken from whichever picture mode puts the most light on the wall, whatever that mode does to the white point.
So the 900-lumen difference between the two spec sheets is not necessarily a difference in the projector. It can be entirely a difference in the box the measurement had to fit inside. That makes three cases this summer. Anker rates the Nebula X1S at 6,000 lumens and its own default picture mode at 3,000, a split we went through last week. Hisense rates the XR10 at 6,000 and two independent labs measured it closer to 3,900. A buyer reading a number on a product page has no way to tell which of these situations they are in, and the industry has spent two years making that harder rather than easier.
Where 2,999 dollars puts it
The preorder price drops the Iris Ultra Max onto a shelf that filled up very fast. Anker’s Nebula X1S sells on Amazon at 3,299 dollars. Hisense’s L9Q ultra short throw is 4,997.97. JMGO’s own N3 Ultimate, the gimbal flagship it launched earlier this year, is discounted to 2,499 as of this week. A buyer with three thousand dollars now has a real choice between a triple-laser long throw, a triple-laser ultra short throw and a laser TV, which was not true in 2024, and it is why our list of what three thousand dollars buys in 2026 looks nothing like the 2022 version.
What nobody outside JMGO has yet is a measurement. No independent lab has published contrast, brightness or input lag figures for this machine in either market, and the 10,000:1 claim in particular is the kind of number a dual iris can produce on a test pattern and then fail to hold on real content, because an aperture stopped down far enough to improve the black floor is also throwing away the light the brightness rating was measured with. IFA runs from September 4 to September 8, and Berlin will be the first place anyone with a meter gets near one. The preorder deposits are riding on an October 19 date the company has not yet had to defend.
