Xgimi has spent more than a decade building a reputation for affordable home cinema projectors, so it was a bit of a surprise to see the company launch a Kickstarter campaign for its high-end Titan Noir Max home theater projector, one that ended up raising $19 million. In testing, the projector blasted through every benchmark, edging out top models in the same price range like the Epson Pro Cinema LS9000 and the Leica Cine Play 1. It only really faltered in one scenario: watching evening scenes from movies like Awake and Tron: Ares in a bright, sunny room.
Normally, any real step up in picture quality means turning to names like JVC or Sony, along with a professional install involving wiring and ceiling mounting. The long-throw Titan Noir Max skips all of that and simply sits on a table. It's consumer-friendly out of the box, yet highly configurable with a deep set of advanced features for anyone who wants to dig in. What really sets it apart, though, is its inky black level for movies, the kind that gives you more of a true home theater look.
Editor's Note: The Xgimi Titan Noir Max is currently only available through a Kickstarter campaign. As such, it is officially unreleased, and the final product is subject to change. If you decide to back it, remember that the usual Kickstarter disclaimers apply, and the product you get may be significantly different from the unit reviewed here. It's also entirely possible you might not get anything at all.
A Kickstarter Success Story With High-End Ambitions
The four adjustable legs on the Titan Noir Max prompted a chuckle at first, mostly out of surprise that no other projector company in recent memory had tried this approach. With four legs, you can adjust the projected image up and down, or even at an angle. For example, if the projector sits off to the side of your couch on a table, you can angle it and adjust the individual legs as needed to square up the picture. Most projectors tested recently only offer adjustable front legs, nothing at the back.
The projector arrives in a hard shell carrying case and is finished entirely in black with silver accents. Xgimi also sells a dedicated stand for $399, though that was skipped in favor of just using a small table. One genuine surprise is that this model runs on a basic version of Google Android. That means once you're through setup, auto keystoning, and picking the picture-quality settings you want, the projector doesn't run on an operating system that lets you stream content directly. The assumption baked into the design is that you'll connect your own AV receiver, streaming devices, or a 4K Ultra BluRay player. That's a perfectly reasonable trade-off, since most high-end home cinema projectors skip built-in streaming anyway. It also means there's no internal OS around to cause slowdowns or extra lag during gaming. In practice, that made it easy to pair a Google TV streamer, an Xbox Series X, and a personal AV receiver for DTS:X surround sound. Dolby Atmos passthrough surround sound audio, however, wouldn't work with an Onkyo TX-RZ50.
Setup and That Clever Four-Leg Design
Configuring the Titan Noir Max's settings took less than five minutes. The simple keystoning function did most of the work, sizing the image to fit the projector screen. The Leica Cine Play 1's automatic image sizing is genuinely nice, but the Titan's simple keystoning and focus options were quick and easy enough that the difference barely mattered. By comparison, the far fussier Epson LifeStudio Grand Plus took considerably longer to get its keystone dialed in.
You don't need to be a certified projector installer to work through the Titan Noir Max's advanced settings, and every one of them is optional anyway. Still, it was worth poking around, including a deep dive on the DBLE, or Dynamic Black Level Enhancement, setting that reduces brightness to make blacks look richer. The automatic iris control was also switched on, which instantly adjusts colors and contrast to match whatever is happening on screen.
Chasing 'Absolute Black' in the Settings
The main discovery here is that the Titan Noir Max performs nicely without touching most of these settings, but there's plenty of headroom for anyone who wants even deeper blacks. That appears to be the projector's real calling card, since Xgimi's own marketing phrase for it is 'absolute black.' You can also manually adjust the F-stop: F2.0 works best in a dark room, while bumping it up to F5.6 delivers more contrast in a brighter room that needs it.
This model exceeds the DCI-P3 and Rec.2020 color gamut spec. Interestingly, even though it's a triple laser RGB projector, enabling the anti-rainbow setting, called Anti-RBE, meant no rainbow effects showed up at all during testing. The projector is also remarkably quiet, thanks to a well-designed enclosure, and perched up on its four legs, there's plenty of room underneath for ventilation.
Benchmark Tests and Movie Trials
Across benchmark tests, the Titan Noir Max outperformed most recent projectors tested. A skin tone test came back varied and warm, showing how different complexions should read as distinct rather than blending together. A winter fence scene with green flecks of grass looked about the same as, or even slightly better than, on the Leica Cine Play 1. Televisions and projectors with so-so contrast tend to render that same grass as too brown and washed out.
Movie testing came next. Just about any Pixar release is a favorite, and the recent Hoppers on Disney+ was genuinely impressive on this projector. It came across as extremely colorful, crisp, and clear, with rich inky blacks and vivid contrast that recalled watching it in an actual theater. There's a scene early in the movie showing a young child and her grandmother, both with matching freckles, sitting near a river with a blue sky in the background. It's mesmerizing, and out of every test run, this was the moment that proved the picture quality is genuinely outstanding.
To test deep blacks, DBLE was switched on alongside further tweaks to noise reduction and sharpness. The go-to film for deep black testing is The Creator, particularly an early-morning scene. Most televisions and projectors with weak contrast and brightness render this clip as washed out, but the Titan Noir Max kept the blacks and dark grays looking rich without a hint of poor contrast, aided mostly by the dynamic iris and DBLE.
Where It Struggles: Bright Rooms
That said, the Titan Noir Max didn't pass every single test with flying colors. Avatar: Fire and Ash looked more lifelike and colorful on the Epson ProCinema LS9000, which uses a high-end lens that holds focus better across the entire image. The Titan Noir Max still looked phenomenal, bright, and colorful in a scene featuring whale-like creatures on a sunny day, but the LS9000 pulled ahead in pure resolution and extreme focus. That same scene looked roughly comparable on the Leica Cine Play 1, matching the Titan's vivid colors.
Testing then moved into a brightly lit room. Many projectors, including the Leica Cine Play 1, simply don't perform well under those conditions. The Titan Noir Max still impressed during battle scenes in War Machine on Netflix, especially when the action moved outdoors. Unbroken was also watched, and its colors stayed vivid rather than washing out. However, in the darkest scenes of Awake, a movie set at night, picture quality wasn't nearly as strong. Both Awake and Tron: Ares looked spectacular in a dark room but noticeably washed out in a sunny one.
Glorious for Gaming and Everything Else
Picture quality in a dark room was convincing enough, but the dynamic iris deserved a closer look, which is where 007: First Light on Xbox came in handy. There's a mind-blowing section late in the game set on a boat surrounded by colorful flowers that looked eye-poppingly real at 120 inches on the projector screen. The max size for this model tops out at 300 inches, big enough to project onto a double stall garage door, though that wasn't attempted since, at 18 pounds, the Titan Noir Max isn't especially portable.
Colors adjusted lightning fast during a nighttime segment in First Light, shifting from bright sun to misty clouds and darker shadows within moments. The Titan Noir Max constantly and instantly adapts to these tonal changes. With the feature enabled, you can hear the iris adjusting faintly, something that might be enjoyable to some and irritating to others. But amid all the gunfire in the game, or during a chaotic movie like Hoppers, the iris noise never becomes noticeable.
A whole batch of PC gaming tests followed, starting with Crimson Desert connected to a laptop. The Titan Noir Max supports 240Hz at 1080p, though getting there requires fussing with a few settings, like enabling game mode and turning off the motion-processing feature MEMC. At that higher refresh rate, every nudge on an Xbox controller connected to the PC felt immediate, with no lag at all. The gacha game NTE also felt responsive during fight scenes, and testing extended to Forza Horizon 6, where a Nissan sports car appeared in full, vivid color on the big screen. Lag was almost nonexistent, which is unusual for a high-end cinema projector.
Sports and News Look Cinematic Too
NBA playoff coverage came next via the YouTube TV app, and once again the dynamic iris kicked in to make the colors pop. It was genuinely surprising how inky black the screen looked during preshow announcements with the stadium lights dimmed. Once the game got underway, jersey colors looked clear and vivid, even without a Timberwolves appearance to enjoy.
News broadcasts on YouTube TV carried that same cinematic vividness, almost as though CBS News was being watched at a movie theater instead of at home.
Remote, Ports and a Few Rough Edges
The Titan Noir Max remote is slim and well-designed for basic functions like volume control and settings. Since the projector doesn't offer streaming through a built-in OS, the four 'shortcut' buttons ended up feeling a bit confusing. They let you quickly change settings like iris control, but a simple Netflix or Prime button would still be preferable on the remote.
Around back, the Titan Noir Max offers a digital optical out, two USB ports (one for an external disk loaded with movies, one for trickle-charging gadgets), three HDMI ports (including one for eARC passthrough audio), a single 3.5 mm audio out, and an Ethernet port. The projector uses Wi-Fi 6 for solid wireless compatibility, and no connectivity issues came up during testing.
Because the Titan Noir Max has no built-in streaming, a Google TV streamer was connected to actually watch movies on it. A 4K streaming device like the Fire TV Stick 4K Max can be picked up for as little as $60, so this isn't much of an obstacle in practice.
Verdict
In the end, the Xgimi Titan Noir Max excels as a home theater projector for movies and TV shows. If the goal is making a movie like Hoppers look colorful with deep blacks the way it would at the local cineplex, this projector ranks among the best options around. It matches up with the vivid colors of the Leica Cine Play 1 and even the Epson ProCinema LS9000. The only real drawback is that image quality can suffer when the projector is used in a brightly lit room.
