The Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 is a no-holds-barred cinephile projector

After smashing onto the projector scene in 2024 with a Kickstarter-funded powerhouse, Valerion has released a range of impressive devices, and the VisionMaster Pro 2 brings small tweaks to one of its most formidable options.

For a high asking price ($2,999, ouch!) you're getting an option that's easy to set up and use, so it's perfect for people who don't know their keystoning or lens shifting. Yet it offers loads of fantastic cinephile features, with its darkness detail features a standout.

Is it the best projector for gaming? Not quite — a few rivals offer more gaming-specific tools, or a similar package for a lower price — but if movie-watching is your primary hobby and gaming a secondary consideration, it's certainly one to consider.

Design

To my eyes, the VisionMaster Pro 2 looks like a chrome accordion. It’s not seen much of a change since the last model, other than a color tweak.

That means it’s a giant ribbed box, weighing 7kg and measuring 10.2 x 7.3 x 8.5 inches, which makes it a little smaller than some rivals like the BenQ X300i. It’s big enough that you’ll really want to think about placement: you don’t want to be moving this thing around every movie night.

Find a good spot for it and keep it in place, for this is no compact option – I moved it around for testing, and it replaced many an arm day. Of course you can mount it to a tripod or stand if you like, with Valerion selling several mounts. There’s also a built-in kickstand, which you can use to angle the projector upwards slightly, and I found this was all I needed to make it a reliable mid-throw device.

You get a real buffet of ports on the back: three HDMIs (two 2.1, one 2.0), two USBs (one 3.0, one 2.0), ethernet, S/PDIF and 3.5mm. It also connects via Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6e, so you get a wide range of connection options.

The included remote has what you’d expect: volume, home, navigation buttons, but there are four presets for streaming service (which I presume will vary by region), a voice navigation tool, and an AI button. There aren’t many buttons on the VisionMaster’s body, so you’ll use this remote for everything.

Features

The Valerion is a true 4K projector: it doesn’t upscale, but outputs at 4K, and at up to 240Hz too. Its max brightness is 3,000 lumens, which is its main upgrade from the first-generation VisionMaster Pro.

I was surprised at how easy the VisionMaster Pro 2 was to set up. There’s no manual keystoning needed: it has a built-in sensor that will scan the wall it’s facing and automatically correct itself. Nine times out of ten, this was incredibly quick, though now and then it would fumble a little bit. No matter: a little wiggle would prompt it to auto-correct once more, and find the correct spread.

You can manually change the picture alignment if you like, but I was won over by just how effective the auto-focusing and screen alignment was. I only jumped into the settings to confirm what was actually there: most users will never need to touch these tools. The optical zoom between 0.9:1 to 1.5:1 is a nice touch too, making the projector more versatile than many others I’ve tested.

For cinephiles, the VisionMaster Pro 2 will tick every box you have, and many you don’t. It offers a 15000:1 contrast ratio, which isn’t the best in the market, but at this top level the differences are hard to see. This provided contrast and vibrancy that made movies and games look fantastic. It was most noticeable when I watched a movie during the day and could see during the night-time scenes.

This pairs with a big VisionMaster selling point: what it’s calling True Hollywood Black, or total darkness when it’s necessary (instead of simply lighting darker areas less), and it ensures you still get detail and contrast when viewing darker images. An algorithm analyses frames to boost contrast and preserve details too, helping you see what’s going on.

There are plenty of other AI tools too, including resolution upscaling and extra details in the dark areas. However most of Valerion’s useful tools, including these, are turned off by default. I’d recommend jumping into the settings menu when you first boot up the thing, and turning everything on that you possibly can.

The projector covers 110% of the REC.2020 color gamut, and it offered me a notably wider range of colors, especially during daytime viewing, than I’ve come to expect. REC.2020 isn’t as often used in viewing tech as P3, but it covers a wider range of colors anyway.

Those are just a handful of the cinema tools that’ll help you enjoy a movie, but there are plenty of standards supported: Dynamic Tone Mapping, HDR10+, IMAX Enhanced, Dolby Vision, Active 3D, the list goes on. Movies looked wonderful.

The VisionMaster has two built-in 12W speakers, which support DTS Virtual:X, DTS:X and Dolby Atmos. Honestly, I was planning to test these out and then connect the projector to my bookshelf speakers, but I ended up using them for the entirety of the review period. They sounded great, offering a much wider sound stage than I was expecting, though this was when viewing alone: if you’re trying to fill up a larger room, external speakers may still help.

By default, the projector runs Google Home, like many alternatives on the market, which will be easy to use for any Android users due to the shared interface (though it’s not hard for anyone). It feels really smooth to use – I don’t know if that’s the projector’s frame rate, or it having enough RAM to make the experience breezy. It also supports Airplay 2, Chromecast and Miracast. Mostly it all worked well, though I faced a few bugs during my testing process, largely from controllers connected to my PlayStation also trying to control the projector.

For example when I plugged a games controller into the VisionMaster’s USB ports to charge it while gaming, a pop-up telling me the display specs arrived and couldn’t be removed. Pressing back on the remote, or circle on the controller, pushed it away… until I pressed forward on the directional pad, and it’d reappear. Suffice to say, I couldn’t game with this thing taking over some of the screen. Also pressing the DualShock's home button changed inputs and took me to Google Home’s main menu; all I wanted to do was check out an achievement I’d unlocked, but to return, I had to find the remote and change inputs back. I can only presume this is a bug, not a feature.

Performance

I used the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 both with my PlayStation and my gaming PC. The first wasn’t taxing on the projector, but I like testing a few ‘party-style’ games like FIFA and older Call of Duty: Zombies. The footie game is a good judge given how important contrast is for picking out the ball and players; suffice to say playing FIFA was a ball (badum-tiss?).

Zombies is an interesting test case, given how darker areas are often integral to the aesthetic of these levels, and often playing on a projector effectively leaves you blind. In this and The Last of Us 2, which I played afterwards, I could see a lot better in night-time or indoor levels than I’m used to in projectors.

Next, to push the 4K and framerate to its limits, I plugged the VisionMaster into my gaming PC. I tested it on a range of titles including AAA open-worlders, my favorite strategy and 4Xers, and a few multiplayer titles too.

I was impressed by how versatile the VisionMaster is: in Hogwarts Legacy I could jump from dark caves to the bright overworld and the medium-lit Hogwarts, and was never once distracted by bloom, or conversely details lost in darker areas. In battles, where you need to instantly tell colors at a glance to know how to respond to spell types, the vibrant color handling made it easy to tell at a glance what was going on. My super-modded version of Skyrim was no different, with a quick tour of various biomes offering a great test case for the various coloring modes and presets.

The handling of details is great, and I enjoyed pushing several Total War games to their visual and framerate limits (or more accurately, my PC’s limits), and it’s really a sight to behold seeing hundreds of high-resolution, smooth-moving Jian Sword Guards plastered across a living room wall. There are some limits on the projector: I could game at 4K at 60fps, but had to drop the resolution to see more frames.

Perhaps because of the lower contrast and brightness, certain cartoony games didn't feel quite as punchy as I've seen on other projectors, but if you don't review projectors you might not notice this.

Gaming felt great, but it was clear to me that movies are the main focus of the VisionMaster – it feels like most of the features that benefit games, were created with movies in mind. It’s where the focus on dark areas really shone (or, didn’t), and the color gamut could be shown in its glory.

One of the key gaming sales features is an on-screen crosshair that you can summon, but this seems only situationally useful. Something I found much more handy is the screen profile presets you can bring up in the settings menu – these are largely for content (sports, movie, gaming), but in a sub-menu, you can actually find presets for different gaming genres. This was a neat touch that you don’t always see.

Let’s briefly touch on input lag: it’s 4ms if you’re gaming at 240Hz, 8ms at 120Hz, and 15ms if you bump up the pixels to 4K 60Hz.

I watched a series of movies on streaming services like Netflix and Mubi, as well as my own discs, and loved how the brightness and features removed many of the annoyances of projector-based movie night. No dimming every light you can find, endlessly keystoning because you knocked the table, intentionally picking brighter titles; a dark movie like Under the Silver Lake looked just as good as a punchy cartoon like Invincible.

One issue for cinephiles: the projector has, by default, motion smoothing. I watched a pretty horrendous first half of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before I found the way to turn it off, There’s no actual ‘off’ mode but you turn motion smoothing to ‘film’ and it stops all the characters looking like their on ice skates. Otherwise, the AI-enabled optimization tools are light-touch enough that they actually complement the picture quality, rather than bulldozing it into something artificial-looking like many TVs do.

Should you buy the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2?

The VisionMaster Pro 2 is undoubtedly one of the best projectors out there – you’d hope so for the price – as its range of useful features means it easily holds its own against the best in the biz. I’d particularly recommend it for living rooms or outdoors where you can’t control the conditions; its high max brightness, solid speakers and effortlessly-easy auto correction mean it’s wonderfully versatile. It’s easy to recommend, marrying top-tier projector tech with superb features and an easy-to-use system.

However I’d be remiss not to point out that the BenQ X3100i costs two thirds of the price, and does beat the Valerion specs-wise in a few different departments. For cinephiles, I think the VisionMaster’s tools will pip the BenQ to the post, but gamers might find these advantages fail to justify the increased cost. And if a $3,000 asking price is out of the question, “should you buy” has an easy answer.

How I tested the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2

I set the Valerion VisionMaster Pro 2 up in my living room, as this area of my home has some blind-less windows, making it a tough testing position for a projector. I tested it at several spots around my home, to test its throw, and settled on a medium-throw placement on my coffee table.

Across many use sessions I tested using the built-in software, a 4K Roku streaming stick, my PS4 and a custom-built gaming PC, with the latter used to push it through its paces. This included plenty of games and movies, and a few TV shows too – it was also used to stream a rocket launch during the testing process. I mostly tested on the default settings, but towards the latter half of my review process, tweaked them quite a bit. For more information on how we make our recommendations, check out the full GamesRadar+ Hardware Policy.

We’re also rounding up all the best outdoor projectors for those last summer weeks, as well as the best portable projectors on the market. If you’re finalizing your setup, you’ll also want to check out the best projector screens available as well.