UST AWOL Vision Aetherion Max RGB Laser Projector Review: Top Buy

UST's AWOL Vision Aetherion Max RGB laser projector gives movie theaters a run for their money, performing best in both dark rooms and bright sunlight.

Review: AWOL Vision Aetherion Max RGB Laser UST Projector

Performing best in both dark rooms and bright sunlight, this projector gives movie theaters a run for their money.

Works well in a dark room or in daylight. Provides a brilliant colorful video image. The projector itself has amazing sound quality. There are many settings to achieve the perfect picture.

Minor issues with auto keying and height channel sound.

It takes a special home theater projector to make me want to watch a movie like Supergirl. Critics panned it for its dark themes, and its visually dark colors make it literally hard to watch. But when I used the AWOL Vision Aetherion Max to play it on a 120-inch screen with Dolby Atmos sound blasting from every corner of my basement, the footage looked stunning.

Aetherion Max offers a cinema-like experience with fine-tuned picture quality and 4K resolution. Supergirl may have suffered from bad CGI and worse dialogue, but the projector's features, such as dark detail and advanced black levels, brought the film to life, making reds and blues pop with surprising clarity.

This $4,499 ultra-short-throw model fits right next to a wall or projector screen. In some ways, it reminds me of the LG Micro RGB Evo TV with highly adjustable picture quality settings. Ultimately, though, I'm a fan of the Aetherion Max because it offers a breathtakingly colorful image.

An engineering marvel, except for the remote

I noticed the Aetherion Max's design before looking into its powerplant specs. This silver projector, which looks a bit like a Tesla Cybertruck, has sharp edges that give you a modern look. The front of the device (the side facing you) has no buttons except for a white line that animates when you turn it on—a detail I found distracting—and then turns off. The other side (facing the screen) is where you'll find three HDMI 2.1 ports (including one for eARC audio pass-through), a USB-A port for a local storage device, optical and 3.5mm audio-out ports, and a 1Gbps Ethernet port for wired streaming.

AWOL Vision Aetherion Max RGB laser UST projector

This model runs on Google TV, which is a relief because it means it only takes a few minutes to set up. Auto keying worked well with manual screen size options. There's also a QR code you can use to automate keystone correction from your phone, but my room was too dark to work for me. (The AWOL Vision reps told me it should work fine even in a dark room like mine.)

The portable projector weighs 19.3 pounds—significantly less than its 23-pound competitor, the Hisense XR10 Smart Projector (8/10, WIRED Recommends)—and I found it easy to hold and move between rooms. For wireless streaming, Aetherion Max supports Wi-Fi 7, which offers good compatibility and speed. It also runs very fast thanks to 8GB of internal RAM and offers 128GB of internal storage for content, although I relied more on streaming.

Unlike the highly rated Xgimi Titan Noir Max, the Aetherion Max's iris does not dynamically adjust when viewing content. But like the Hisense XR10, you can adjust the picture quality settings to suit the room. For example, Dolby Vision Bright works best in a bright room, allowing the iris to let in more light.

For color accuracy, the projector reaches 110 percent Rec. 2020 spec This means that if you watch a movie that matches that color spec, like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 or Inside Out, you'll see the entire color palette. The AWOL Vision also lists a contrast ratio of 6000:1 and lumens at ISO 3300, but—as I've learned from personal experience—those specs aren't the final arbiter of image quality. Many other factors play a role, including how dark a room is.

The downside here is the remote control, which is functional if not impressive. I like its large home button which is centrally located and easy to find in the dark without looking. There's also a button for Google Gemini and convenient shortcuts for apps like Netflix. My main gripe is with the volume buttons, which are right above the shortcuts, but are small and hard to find. Only the upper half of the remote control has a backlight, which does not extend to all buttons, including volume.

The Aetherion Max's ability to work in a brightly lit room surprised me during testing. I watched Mayday on Apple TV+ from start to finish in broad daylight, projecting the image onto a wall that's roughly 16 feet in diameter. I didn't notice any contrast issues and could see night scenes just fine. Slight warping on my wall distorted the image a bit, but that's to be expected from ultra-short throw models.

In my windowless test room, with a full surround sound system that even includes ceiling-height channel speakers, the Aetherion Max fared even better. To test the projector's contrast ratio and brightness, I usually play dark scenes in Awake and The Creator, and I've never seen scenes look as good as when rendered by the Aetherion Max. I didn't even have to change the picture quality settings (and I generally don't when I test these specs).

However, the dark scenes in House of the Dragon that I played using the HBO Max app required user intervention. A moonlit beach scene featuring a mysterious dragon is difficult even on high-end home theater projectors, but when I turned on Dark Detail and Enhanced Black Level, I could suddenly see everything clearly, just as the TV show's creators intended.

In fact, every time I encountered a minor problem with image quality, I found a similar setting that solved the problem. In a dark hallway scene during Batman, the red gun flashes looked bright and clear, but some of the amber on Batman looked too dark. When I switched to Dolby Vision Bright, I could easily detect grimaces and muscle flexing. Some projectors look a little out of focus on the edges, but not with the Aetherion Max. In Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogo on Disney+, a snowy scene shows incredible pixel clarity all the way to the bottom of the screen.

For gaming, I tested NBA 2K27 with the new Nvidia GeForce driver on an Alienware Aurora gaming laptop. The stunning graphics, which use realistic lighting and detail, were a convincing case for Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves in my test room. When I tried Onimusha: Way of the Sword on PC, I was equally surprised by the crisp graphics. At this larger size, with incredibly sharp pixel depth across the screen, every samurai slash looks more realistic. This projector is great for gaming, uses ultra-low latency (just 1ms) with no lag, graphical stutter or lag, and allows for fast controller responses.

The sound on the projector itself is strong. I felt like I was in a movie theater when I watched Civil War and Unbroken through the Onkyo TX-RZ50 AV receiver. A minor glitch was that when I used the height channel speakers for 7.1.2 audio, the sound dropped out (AWOL Vision is investigating why).

The Aetherion Max also passed benchmarks for demo rings with flying colors in most cases. While scenes with flowers, white mist over a snowy mountain, water in a deep blue ocean, and two horses in a field looked mesmerizing and realistic, it was difficult to distinguish dark trees against a dark background. The skin tone test also produced unremarkable results. I'm not sure why, but two faces in a group photo looked very similar, and a few more tests revealed a lack of tonal variation. Adjusting the settings did not help. However, this detail didn't have much of an impact on my overall impression of the projector, as this is a subtle color measure.

The AWOL Vision Aetherion Max is ultimately an amazing projector: a rock star of color accuracy, with crisp pixel resolution across the entire image and excellent contrast. While the price is in line with other high-end models, this is a seriously capable home theater model.