The Hisense M2 Pro room-to-room projector ($1,299.99) is one of the least-expensive 4K triple-laser projectors available at this writing. Having three lasers means the M2 Pro offers a wider color gamut (range of colors) than typical for other kinds of light sources. Our current Editors' Choice pick for an inexpensive room-to-room portable, the Anker Nebula Cosmos 4K SE, uses both lasers and LEDs, resulting in a narrower gamut, but its higher brightness keeps the 4K SE in place as our top pick. That said, if you don't mind a smaller picture size for any given image brightness, the M2 Pro's wider range of colors—which can translate to more accurate, lifelike color—could be enough to make it your preferred choice.

Design and Setup: Projecting Some Pleasant Surprises

The M2 Pro offers a distinctive take on a common design for room-to-room portables: a not-quite-cubical projector permanently mounted on a stand for tilting up and down. However, unlike most, it rotates a full 360 degrees, allowing you to aim it at virtually any angle in front, above, behind, or below. If you want to rotate it horizontally, however, you'll need to pick it up slightly to turn it. Rubber feet keep it from sliding easily.

The M2 Pro is compact for a 4K room-to-room model. With the lens pointed straight ahead, it measures 8.6 by 9.1 by 7.6 inches (HWD). However, it isn't as bulky as the numbers suggest, since part of the height and width come from the stand. It's also lighter than most, at 8.6 pounds. A cutout in the base serves as a handle for carrying it short distances, such as from room to room, and it comes packed in a carrying case for wider portability.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

As with all 4K triple-laser models, the M2 Pro generates its 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) image by reflecting its three laser colors, one at a time, off the mirrors of a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel DLP chip equipped with TI's XPR fast-switch pixel shifting. As you'd expect, the lasers deliver a wide color gamut. Hisense rates the M2 Pro at 110% of BT.2020, the standard for UHD TVs. The rated lifetime is 25,000 hours.

Initial setup is a little easier than with most of the competition, thanks to the M2 Pro using the Vidaa OS (a Linux-based OS developed by a subsidiary of Hisense) instead of the more common Google TV or Android TV. Once you've plugged in the power cord and set up Wi-Fi (the only option for connecting to your internet-connected network), the M2 Pro is ready to go. Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+, and other popular apps are already installed. And, of course, Vidaa has an app store for downloading more.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

In addition to Wi-Fi for streaming, the M2 Pro has an HDMI 2.1 port on the back, which supports Automatic Low Latency Mode (ALLM) for game consoles, and a USB port for reading files from a USB key. The projector also supports wireless mirroring using MirrorCast for Android devices and AirPlay for iOS. (Note that Miracast allows a direct connection, while AirPlay requires both connecting the iOS device to the same network the projector is on, and an internet connection to the network.)

Also helping make setup easy: fully automated focus, keystone correction, screen alignment, obstacle avoidance, and wall-color correction. As always, it's best to avoid any digital adjustments for screen geometry, as we do for our formal testing, since they lower image brightness for any given image size and can introduce artifacts. However, if you plan to use them anyway, the automatic features will significantly speed up the setup process. In our informal tests, I had no need to manually adjust any of the automated settings.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

In a particularly nice touch, the 1.3x-powered optical zoom dovetails seamlessly with the digital zoom, raising the overall zoom range to 2.4x. Even better, when making the adjustments manually, the projector puts a message on screen telling you whether you're in the optical or digital range, so you can easily avoid digital zoom if you prefer.

Robust audio is another pleasant surprise. The sound system offers dual 10-watt speakers and support for Dolby Digital and DTS Virtual:X. Even at levels well below maximum, it delivers high enough volume to fill a large family room at satisfyingly crisp quality. You can also take advantage of Bluetooth or the HDMI port's eARC support to connect to an external audio system. However, the audio is good enough that you're more likely to take advantage of its Music Sharing mode—Vidaa's name for a Bluetooth speaker mode—to use the M2 Pro as a speaker for another device.

Image Quality: To Get the Best, Change Modes

In addition to SDR, the M2 Pro supports HDR10, HLG, and Dolby Vision, plus it adds Filmmaker mode to both the SDR and HDR lists. In my tests, it automatically switched to the appropriate picture-mode menu for every type of input I used, with separate menu lists for SDR, HDR10, and Dolby Vision. Hisense says the M2 Pro lacks a separate picture-mode list for HLG.

In my preliminary tests, the default choices for SDR and HDR10 picture modes produced vibrant colors, but not always accurate ones. This is actually not a bad choice for a room with bright ambient light, which tends to wash out the colors to tone down the oversaturation. For my formal testing in a dark room, however, I chose Filmmaker mode, which delivered more accurate color and good contrast with default settings.

The only changes I made were to adjust the Brightness level to set it correctly for a dark room and adjust frame interpolation—listed on the menu as Ultra Smooth Motion—to match my preference. Frame interpolation can improve the look of live or recorded video, but the default setting makes filmed material look like live video. I switched to the Film setting, which smoothed motion slightly without adding that "digital video" effect. After these adjustments, the M2 Pro scored well across the board, delivering solid color accuracy, including for skin tones, along with spot-on contrast and shadow detail.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

For my formal HDR tests, I viewed the HDR10 versions of the same scenes on disc as the SDR test. I picked the HDR Standard picture mode as having the best balance of overall brightness, color accuracy, and contrast. The only setting I changed for HDR was the frame interpolation, setting it to Film here, too.

Image quality for HDR was largely the same overall as for the SDR tests, except that some colors were a touch oversaturated. However, I'm very familiar with our test clips and can spot small differences; most people would probably not notice the oversaturation, and anyone who does probably won't consider it enough of a problem to matter. I didn't see any obvious improvement in shadow detail in the HDR versions, but that's definitively not meant as a criticism in this case. It's not that it didn't hold well for HDR; it's that it held so surprisingly well with SDR that there was little room for improvement. Informal tests with streaming material, including with Dolby Vision input, gave essentially the same level of image quality as in my formal tests.

The only real issue I observed in my testing was that rainbow artifacts (red/green/blue flashes) in dark-room viewing were more frequent and more obvious than with most DLP projectors today, which can be a potential issue for those who see them as easily as I do. I didn't see any speckling, which can also be an issue for triple-laser models, but I don't tend to see speckling as easily. As always, our advice is to buy from a dealer that allows easy, free returns so you can judge these two issues yourself.

(Credit: M. David Stone)

The spec sheet for the M2 Pro also lists support for 3D. However, it's limited to support for top-bottom, left-right, and frame-packing formats. I was able to confirm it worked, in combination with DLP-Link glasses, using a left-right-format YouTube clip. Although Hisense said it should work with Blu-ray players, it didn't work with ours, so I wasn't able to run our usual tests for crosstalk and 3D motion artifacts. I didn't see either with the material I viewed, but without clips that are known to cause these problems, that's not a meaningful test.

The M2 Pro test unit wouldn't sync with my Bodnar 4K Lag Tester at any resolution or refresh rate I tried, so I wasn't able to get an input lag measurement. Hisense claims input lag measures of less than 20 milliseconds (ms) at 4K/60Hz, less than 12ms at 1080p/120Hz, and less than 6ms at 1080p/240Hz.

Using the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recommendations for a dark room, the rated 1,300 ANSI lumen brightness would be enough to fill a roughly 140-to-190-inch, 1.0-gain screen. In my tests, using my preferred settings, the image was comfortably bright for both SDR and HDR on my 90-inch-diagonal screen. On a cloudy day in a family room, I switched to one of the brighter picture modes and settled on a 75-inch-diagonal image for a suitably bright picture. The image was still watchable, though a little more washed out, when the sun broke through the clouds and the room brightened.