Hisense 100L9GTUK 4K UST Laser Projector Review (2024)

The 100L9GTUK immediately makes its mark as one of the brightest UST projectors around. Thanks to the three-laser lighting system, much more of the claimed 3000 lumens of light appears to be reaching - and then reflecting off - the screen than you might normally expect to see. This helps its pictures punch through the sort of ambient light regular living rooms are typically faced with exceptionally well, retaining good levels of not only brightness but also colour saturation and even contrast.

... immediately makes its mark as one of the brightest UST projectors around

The ALR screen clearly doesn’t do any harm here either, clearly reducing the impact of any ambient light on the final picture. It doesn’t fully remove it, of course, but it does enough to ensure that much more of the light that’s rebounded off the screen is exclusively from the projector.

As well as helping the 100L9GTUK hold on to a more dynamic and satisfying picture in bright room settings, the laser lighting and screen qualities contribute to a seriously punchy image in dark room settings. In fact, the intensity borders on being too much if you use the Dynamic preset that works best for light rooms. Though actually, once you’ve acclimatised to it, I’d say the Dynamic preset is still the best option for all room situations, despite the 100L9GTUK having other themed presets that you’d expect to deliver the best results for different types of content. I’ll come back to this point later.

Colours look comfortably richer and more natural than they do from the single-laser set up of Hisense’s L5 model. In fact, colour volumes are the fullest I’ve seen on any UST projector bar the Samsung Premiere LSP9T. What’s more, even in Dynamic mode the potent saturations are achieved while maintaining decent levels of tonal subtlety and blend purity, with no interference from striping or ‘flaring out’. This contributes to the 100L9GTUK getting more impact from HDR sources in dark rooms than the vast majority of its projector kin.

There is a little clipping in the very brightest parts of HDR pictures, but not as much, actually, as you’d typically see with less natively bright projectors.

Once you’ve got used to its brightness and intensity, you start to see that the 100L9GTUK is keen on the smaller things in projector life too, delivering a level of detail and sharpness that feels 4K. Or, at least, much closer to 4K than HD. This is particularly helpful with images as large as those the 100L9GTUK is capable of producing.

So impactful are the 100L9GTUK’s pictures in darkish conditions that they capture the experience of watching a big TV rather than a projector. Though inevitably this comparison slips when there’s ambient light to contend with.

While the 100L9GTUK’s pictures are impressive overall by UST standards, there are limitations you need to be aware of. For starters, black levels are fairly average. This is hardly a unique finding for the UST world; all the brightness these projectors need to find to combat ambient light has to have a trade off somewhere. But it’s certainly an area where some regular throw projectors and many premium TVs perform better.

... a frustration for anyone really keen on an accurate out of the box experience

The 100L9GTUK’s ALR screen also causes a small and fortunately fairly faint ‘hot spot’ of light towards the centre of the image’s bottom edge. This, though, is actually far less of an issue on the new, flexible screen than it was on the previous solid one, where the hot spot was much larger and brighter, making it pretty much impossible to ignore. The new screen hotspot, by comparison, is only visible at all during very dark scenes, and even then it’s only a fairly marginal distraction.

The design of the ALR screen’s surface means that the picture can lose quite a bit of brightness if viewed from much of an angle off axis, and more surprisingly stand out bright elements in a picture can appear with a little of DLP’s rainbow effect (red, green and blue striping) flitting over them.

Most of the 100L9GTUK’s picture presets prove unhelpful, too. Chiefly because they favour a warmer tone - as you would expect, actually - that doesn’t seem to fit very well with the innately slightly cool tone that the projector’s optics seem most comfortable with. This is why I recommend the Dynamic preset for most viewing; it just seems to gel better with the projector’s colour tuning. This will, of course, be a frustration for anyone really keen on an accurate out of the box experience, but the Dynamic preset really is quite effective at delivering a picture that plays to the projector’s strengths and works particularly well in ambient light.

One smaller setting you might want to tweak while using the Dynamic mode is the Adaptive Contrast setting. In its Max mode this can cause the image to look a little unstable, with noticeable ‘jumps’ in baseline brightness. Its medium mode solves this - but only at the expense of quite a bit of vibrancy. My suggestion would be to use the setting on Max in a bright room, but on Medium in a dark room.

Finally on the picture quality front, motion is handled a bit untidily. Turn off the provided motion processing and judder is a little too pronounced. Turn it on, and objects slightly billow across the screen rather than passing by with a convincing cinematic 24p judder.

... the 100L9GTUK’s tuning actually suits the relatively normal living room circ*mstances it’s really designed for

The 100L9GTUK’s sound is solid. There’s far more power and forward projection than you hear with the vast majority of projector sound systems, and the dynamic range is wide enough to deliver movie soundtracks without harshness or thinness.

Dialogue can sound a little as if it’s coming from the projector beneath the screen rather than the onscreen action, though. Really heavy bass lines can cause the speakers some distress too, causing them to buzz or cut out. Finally, Dolby Atmos soundtracks take on a strangely coarse, unrefined tone that may persuade many users to stick with stereo. If Atmos is important to you, you’ll very likely want to add a separate Atmos sound system at some point.