Photograph: John Brandon

I won’t harp on these detriments too much, because the GT2400HDR is not meant to compete with a movie theater. I switched to a few more games and found that Red Dead Redemption 2 on an Xbox Series X looked pretty good, if a little too atmospheric. That’s a kind way of saying the contrast is not great. At times, it seemed like the projected image had more in common with an LCD computer monitor than a home cinema projector.

The GT2400HDR disappointed in its handling of what should be impressive updated graphics in Halo: Campaign Evolved. Instead of rich, vibrant-looking trees, they looked too bland, with flat, dull greens. In Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced, the colors in a level that takes place in Havana should pop when you walk through the town, but the blue tunics, yellow fruit, and green trees lacked vibrancy.

A news broadcast looked dull and bland, as did a World Cup match I rewatched. There’s a theme here: bland and dull colors. However, I was surprised that a dark scene of a character riding a bike in the movie Awake didn’t look terrible. I could make out faces and some colors, which is saying a lot since this scene is hard to render. An entire moonlit scene in House of the Dragon, via the HBO app on a Google TV Streamer, looked completely washed out until I switched to the Vivid picture mode, which helped a bit. It was all par for the course, no pun intended.

I then watched scenes from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and noticed that Cinema picture mode did help punch up the colors a bit. Super Mario Galaxy lacked the color vibrancy and clarity that it normally has and looked like it was playing on a cheap computer monitor (e.g., poor contrast and less-than-vivid colors). When I switched to The Ark on YouTube TV, the colors looked much better because the show features bright, well-lit interior shots in almost every scene.

In the end, everything I tested and benchmarked on the GT2400HDR looked just OK, but I liked how well this projector works as a golf simulator. It can run all day long for multiple rounds, has low latency to make sure your controller nudges translate to accurate drives, and looks massive and bright on a large projector screen in a dark room. Sure, just about everything else is average, but if you are into golf, this is a good low-cost entry-level option.