Hisense XR10 review: One of the top projectors you can buy right now — if you can afford it

The Hisense XR10 isn’t just a successor to the Hisense C2 Ultra that proved to be one of the best projectors, it’s on a different level: The new Hisense XR10 offers extreme brightness and far more advanced optics for incredible flexibility in setups.

It still sports an RGB laser projection system for stunning color, but now it has integrated a physical iris to dial up the contrast.

So what’s the catch? The Hisense C2 Ultra was $2,999 when it launched. The XR10 is $5,999 ($4,999 on sale). You can get a lot from this projector, but it’s not exactly a value-forward device. Is it worth clearing out the coffers for the Hisense XR10? Read on to find out.

Hisense XR10 review: Pricing and availability

The Hisense XR10 debuted at CES 2026 and only took a few months to start shipping in May 2026. It received an initial price of $6,999, but Hisense’s shop was quick to show a $1,000 discount that brought that down to $5,999 while including a free carrying case.

Our test unit was a consumer model that included the case, which is a quality and sturdy suitcase with rollers and multiple carry points. It’s a considerable upgrade over the styrofoam carrying cases paired with recent JMGO and Valerion projectors.

Speaking of the competition, the Valerion VisionMaster Max undercuts the XR10 in price at $3,399 — though it’s not as bright — and the new JMGO N3 Ultimate could be a real threat at a much more palatable price of $2,399.

Hisense XR10 review: Design

The XR10 is lovely, with dark bronze-colored metal wrapping around most of its surface. Its extremely prominent optics dominate the front, flanked by a handful of sensors that handle auto-focus, eye protection, and automatic screen alignment. The back and sides are largely covered in grilles for the considerable airflow needed to keep the projector cool, though an internal liquid cooling loop helps keep it fairly quiet for a 11.5 x 10.7 x 8.4-inch box pumping out over 6,000 lumens.

One side of the projector includes a little stylized flourish with a clear cover hinting at the laser hardware inside. That cover wraps around to the top to give that side some style as well, as it’s otherwise just a blank slab with a small ambient light sensor and a protruding power button that doubles as a hardware volume dial. The lens cover also has a knurled circumference suggestive of manual-focus lenses, though it’s not.

The projector sits on four little feet that screw in and out to help adjust the tilt of the projector. These are very handy to have if you don’t have perfectly level surfaces in your household. There’s an additional hole in the center of the underside for use with tripod and ceiling mount setups. At 23.4 pounds, you’ll want to make sure you put it on a sturdy support.

The rear of the projectors offers three HDMI ports, 3.5mm and S/PDIF audio outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, and two USB-A ports. Two of the HDMI ports are high-speed HDMI 2.1 ports, but one also handles eARC. The third is an HDMI 2.0 port. As nice as it is to see Gigabit Ethernet for stable networking, you probably won’t need it since the XR10 supports Wi-Fi 7.

The XR10 somewhat unfortunately uses an external power supply brick that isn’t quite as nice to see on a coffee table or mantle as the projector itself.

Hisense XR10 review: Performance

The action sequence near the beginning of “The Gray Man” is a brilliant showcase of the XR10’s chops. It's full of flashy, colorful fightworks, deep shadows with characters in silhouette, and fluid action. The projector’s punchy RGB-laser lighting provides gorgeous color throughout all that. Its strong contrast keeps the lights brilliant and shadows deep. And its processing handles the motion well, so it’s not stuttery or choppy.

That’s with every setting dialed in, though. This projector, like so many others, has a few unfortunate defaults. For example, many of the picture modes use heavy motion smoothing when the projector first comes out of the box. This may smooth out camera pans, but it more often introduces odd artifacts from on-screen motion. I found it best disabled, set to film, or manually set to a very low level. Occasionally having it enabled could help avoid flicker from high-contrast, fine-detailed elements moving across the screen (think black and white bars in a panning shot), but I never found higher smoothing levels necessary

With a rated brightness of 6,000 lumens, the XR10 delivers amazing performance for daytime viewing, and it’s impressive just how good content still looks even with a couple of lights on in the room. The brighter settings remain a good choice even as you dim the room lights, just so long as you also start to lower the laser brightness a little. Nonetheless, even without running at full brightness and with the aperture half closed, I was quite impressed at how pleasantly clear even cinematic content was, let alone bright shows like “Last Week Tonight” or “Bob’s Burgers.”

In a very dark room with no lights on, clamping down on the iris helps lower the black levels wonderfully. In many cases, especially with Dolby Vision Dark mode, I could no longer see letterboxing around the picture, and starfields like the scene of the “sky people” arriving at the beginning of “Avatar: The Way of Water” offer a brilliant contrast between the glowing thruster heat sinks, the stars, and the black of space. If there’s a little ambient light, the projector has plenty of brightness to overpower it, letting it continue to provide perceptually strong contrast.

All of the projection is channeled through great optics that provide crisp visuals edge to edge. Since the projector has substantial lens shift and zoom range, it’s easy to avoid needing digital keystone or adjustments that sacrifice the picture. The XR10 can shift the image by up to 130% vertically and 46% horizontally while also going from a wide 0.84:1 throw ratio to a longer 2:1 throw ratio.

As the XR10 uses DLP projection, which projects colors in a sequence, it can create the rainbow effect. I am not very sensitive to it generally, but can usually see it if I'm looking for it. However, on the XR10, I have never spotted it. Whatever sequence Hisense is using to deliver each frame seems to do a wonderful job of minimizing the DLP rainbow effect.

The powerful projection does come with some heat, and that means cooling fans need to run much of the time the XR10 is running. Generally, they’re not loud even when it's maxing out brightness, but don’t expect perfect silence.

Though the XR10 features automatic correction features like obstacle avoidance and screen alignment, it may be a little hard to take advantage of all of these. The projector zooms all the way out when attempting these corrections, and its short throw ratio can see it cover a huge area, which makes it easy for the picture to go so far outside of bounds that it can’t effectively make those corrections. Other features, like automatic keystone and eye protection don’t work if lens shift has been used. The trade-off between optical and automatic adjustments isn’t uncommon, but it’s a little disappointing nonetheless.

Hisense XR10 review: Test results

It doesn’t take advanced tools to see how impressive the XR10 is, but even with specific measurements, it stands up. I used a Spyder X2 Ultra colorimeter to measure the XR10’s color gamut reflecting off a 1.1-gain projection screen, and I used a lux meter to measure its brightness using an ANSI test pattern.

It’s rare enough for a projector to meet its specified brightness, but the XR10 actually exceeded it. In its Vivid picture profile at full brightness and with the iris open, the XR10 hit a staggering 6,841 lumens. More importantly, that’s with a useful picture setting. Opting for a cooler whitepoint and using the Brightness Enhanced mode, the projector took on an unsightly green tinge but jumped up to 7,757 lumens. When you don’t need all that brightness, I found keeping the original settings unchanged but clamping the iris down could lower brightness to 1,291 lumens for more palatable viewing in a dark room.

Contrast also proves strong. Taking the measurements proved tricky, as the projector automatically dims extra when displaying a full black screen, but it takes a moment to do so. Taking the measurement of a full black screen before that extra dimming, I measured 1.37 lux which comes out to a 2,431:1 FOFO (full-on, full-off) contrast ratio between fully white screen and fully black screen. Intra-frame contrast is lower, of course, but it was still impressive.

When testing with a 10% APL white box in the middle of the screen, the projector offered a 381:1 contrast ratio with its iris open and a 418:1 contrast ratio with it closed. It’s worth noting here that these are also not even the ideal levels, enough light bounces around the room to raise the black levels. Essentially, the XR10 is good enough that you’ll want to consider painting your walls and ceiling a dark color or putting up velvet to get the most out of its capabilities.

The RGB lasers offer a wide color gamut. I measured 100% coverage of the sRGB color space, 92% of the DCI-P3, and 90% of the BT.2020. This may be a little short of the advertised color gamut, but measuring projector gamut has some margin of error since you can’t take color readings directly from the screen as you can on a TV. Suffice to say, this projector offers gobsmacking color.

Hisense XR10 review: Audio

The Hisense XR10 may pack a 2.1 speaker setup, but that “subwoofer” doesn’t dig quite as deep as you might hope. It gives a little punch to the low end, but no deep booming or thunder. Sub-bass is almost completely absent. The speakers are more tuned to mids and the upper bass range, giving a fullness to most sounds and voices, but leaving a bit to be desired out of music where brilliance and presence are concerned.

The speakers can get quite loud without distorting, too, but they don’t provide much separation. This makes for a congested soundstage that’s neither great for music nor movies. Speech is intelligible, but you won’t get a sense of immersion from the audio.

Hisense certainly intends for the XR10 to be paired with a quality sound system, but it’s nice enough to see that it’s put some effort to a sound system that at least will let you make do when one isn’t readily at hand (such as when you transport the projector to a new location).

Hisense XR10 review: Gaming

Gaming on the Hisense XR10 is a blast, though it still has room for improvement. By default, it’s happy to handle games plenty well. Without even bothering to change any settings for gaming, input lag was satisfyingly low. I played through 20 waves in Brotato and a handful of stages in Towerfall Ascencion, seeing everything in crisp detail and never once noticing input lag at 4K. Playing through the first few hours of 007: First Light with the projector swapped over to 1080p/240Hz mode, I had no trouble navigating the darker opening section, and I found the later gunplay perfectly snappy while controlling with a mouse.

I measured latency by running a timecode generator on my laptop, which has a 120Hz OLED display, and mirroring the display to the projector, then snapped a high-speed photo of both displays to see how far behind the timecode on the projector was compared to the laptop display. With default settings at 4K/60Hz, the projector was just 23ms behind. Switching to Game Mode didn’t move the needle.

The projector can also change to 1080p/240Hz for ultra-smooth gaming. But this also didn’t reduce the latency I measured. It was only after I also enabled DLP Turbo Mode in settings that the latency dropped further, allowing the projector to show 0ms of latency behind the laptop display.

The one thing the Hisense XR10 is missing is support for variable refresh rates. VRR hasn’t been available in projectors for very long, but it is possible to incorporate now. Instead, you’ll want to ensure you’re capping your framerates at 60 for 4K or 240 for 1080p.

Hisense XR10 review: Smart TV interface

You won’t find the typical Google TV or Android TV interface on the Hisense XR10. It runs on Hisense’s own VidaaOS, and that has its upsides and downsides. First, it’s fast, letting me quickly find the app or setting I want and get back to business. Unfortunately, the app selection is far more limited than Google TV. Most of the big streaming services are there and work properly, but if you’re looking for anything even slightly off the beaten path (like Jellyfin), your odds go way down.

Some of VidaaOS’s menus are a little annoying to navigate as they can have a lot of layers to back out of, but it also will display menus over content, which can be helpful for making picture adjustments with content in view. That said, some settings adjustments will automatically back you out of the menu entirely, so if you didn’t like the tweak, you’ll have to dig all the way back in to adjust it further.

Frustratingly, accessing settings with the remote shortcut doesn’t work from the home screen, so you have to instead navigate to the settings or launch an app and then use the shortcut. There’s also no quick access to the projection settings. Having an extra quick way to jump into optical zoom, lens shift, or iris would be very handy.

Sadly, VidaaOS is as plagued by ads as other interfaces, and when connected to the internet, it will proudly pull up large banner advertisements to display on the home screen. It’s just lucky that getting away from these is quick. You can keep VidaaOS offline and operate it as a more basic OS, though, and it doesn’t require an account to use most features, unlike the competition.

Hisense XR10 review: Remote

The XR10 comes with a simple and effective remote. It has the typical navigation controls of a modern smart TV with a prominent navigation circle. Below this are back and home buttons. It includes pill-shaped controls for volume and brightness, making it easy to feel these out, and there’s a dedicated mute button. The bottom of the remote offers shortcuts to Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, and Disney+.

At the top of the remote, you’ll find some useful tools. There are shortcuts to input selection, quick settings, auto-focus, and voice control. The remote also conveniently lights up when a button is pressed, illuminating all the controls except the app shortcuts. It’s only a shame the remote doesn’t light up on motion, too, as that can be helpful in a dark theater. It’s easy enough to just quickly tap the volume button to get the lights on at least.

Hisense XR10 review: Verdict

The Hisense XR10 offers simply brilliant projection that’s a knockout in dark home theater environments and can still dazzle even with overhead lights on. The picture settings can use a few tweaks to get the most out of it, but if you’re willing to play around with it, the XR10 will leave you feeling like going to the movie theater is a downgrade.

It works wonderfully for all sorts of content and can game quite well. And all of that comes from a fairly compact, elegant box that is easy to bring wherever you like and set up easily thanks to highly flexible optics. It’s a little annoying that some of the settings that help the XR10 adapt to different environments aren’t a single click away on the remote, however.

The biggest drawback of the XR10 is its extreme price tag: At $5,999, it’s a considerable outlay, and anyone who doesn’t need the extreme brightness can probably get away with something like the Hisense C2 Ultra for half the cost.

Ultimately, the XR10 will be for those seeking a high-end solution that’s extremely flexible with where and how you use it. Its optics let you put it wherever is convenient and still enjoy a killer picture while its brightness and iris make it possible to enjoy content in pitch-black and bright rooms alike. If you can afford it, the XR10 makes an ideal midway point between the more consumer-focused projectors from Xgimi and JMGO and the more professional models like the Epson LS12000 or Sony Bravia Projector series.