XGIMI began taking reservations for its AURA 3 ultra short throw series on 1 September. The terms are a $50 deposit, fully refundable, held against a Kickstarter campaign that opens on 20 October; depositors get an extra $200 off whatever the campaign price turns out to be. One deposit reserves one projector, and the buyer picks now whether that projector is the AURA 3 Max or the AURA 3 Pro.
Picking between them from the page itself is not possible. The two spec lists sit side by side, identical except for the words “Ultimate Performance” and “Premium Performance” at the top, and where the brightness figure should be, XGIMI has printed ▮▮▮▮ ISO Lumens. Underneath it, ▮▮▮▮ Native Contrast. Both models, both lines, in gold type against the black background so the redaction reads as a tease rather than an error. There is no price anywhere on the page either.
XGIMI is at least explicit about what the money does. “Please note this is a reservation, not a product purchase,” the deposit page says. “No physical item will be shipped from this page. The final product purchase will be completed through Kickstarter.” The $50 comes back after the campaign closes and the pledge is charged. The float is seven weeks; the risk is not the fifty dollars.
Down the hall in Denver, the same two blanks
CEDIA Expo opened its show floor in Denver today. AWOL Vision is at booth 4019 in the Colorado Convention Center with the first public showing of the LuxVision, its own 4K/120 ultra short throw. AWOL’s product page went up ahead of the show, and it makes the same editorial decision XGIMI made.
“Light That Holds Its Ground,” one section reads. “With ████ lumens, LuxVision delivers brilliant, stable visuals that stand up to real-home lighting.” Further down: “Six years spent refining darkness into depth. Native ████ contrast and 7-level Dynamic IRIS reveal cleaner blacks and richer shadow detail.” A different block character, the same two numbers.
What makes this worth noting rather than merely amusing is how selective the blanking is. AWOL publishes the optical shift range down to the percentage point — 142 to 152 percent vertical, “without cropping, scaling, or losing true 4K detail.” It publishes the 0.18:1 throw ratio, the 110 percent Rec.2020 claim, the 1ms latency, VRR and ALLM, the seven-step iris. It publishes everything except the two figures a buyer would use to rank the LuxVision against the AURA 3. XGIMI’s page is built the same way: throw ratio, Harman Kardon wattage, HDR formats, Google TV, anti-rainbow processing, all present. Lumens and contrast, blacked out.
Three world firsts in forty-eight hours
Both machines are being sold on the same claim, and the wording is where the fight is. XGIMI’s press release calls the AURA 3 “the world’s first 4K 120Hz UST projector series.” AWOL’s banner reads “World’s First 4K 120Hz UST Projector with Optical Shift.” JMGO, announcing the IRIS line at IFA on the same day, called the Iris Ultra Max “the world’s first 4K/120Hz smart projector.”
Read in order, each claim is narrower than the last one it has to survive. JMGO takes the whole category. XGIMI takes ultra short throw. AWOL takes ultra short throw with an optical shift mechanism, which as far as we can tell is a set with one member in it. Nobody is lying, exactly. Everyone has found a qualifier that fits.
JMGO did one thing the other two did not, which is publish numbers. The Iris Ultra Max is 6,500 ISO lumens and 10,000:1 native contrast at $3,499, with a $2,999 preorder; the step-down Iris Ultra is $2,399. We went through that sheet earlier this week, including the gap between its ISO rating and the CVIA figure the same machine carries in China. Whatever else is true of it, a buyer can price it against something.
The numbers exist; they are just not on the manufacturers’ pages
The AURA 3 Max redaction is the odd one, because the figures behind it have been public since the middle of August. ProjectorScreen — a US retailer that sells XGIMI — published the Western sheet on 17 August: 5,700 ISO lumens, up to 8,000:1 native contrast, a 0.47-inch DMD driven by two DLPC8545 controllers in parallel, 0.163:1 throw, 4K at 120Hz and 1080p at 240Hz. That was sixteen days before XGIMI’s own store put a black bar over the first two of those. We covered that sheet when it appeared.
The LuxVision figure has leaked the same way. The German outlet 4kfilme, which has been first to several of this season’s launches, put the LuxVision at 5,500 ISO lumens with the 110 percent Rec.2020 claim and a German street price it expects to land at €5,000 or above. AWOL has not confirmed any of that.
So the two blacked-out brightness figures are, on the best available reporting, 5,700 and 5,500. They are close enough that neither company would enjoy having them printed next to each other, which is a more plausible reason for the bars than any of the suspense the pages are working so hard to build.
The Pro is the only genuine blank
There is one figure on the XGIMI page that really is unknown. We could not find a published brightness or contrast rating for the AURA 3 Pro in either the Western material or the Chinese coverage of the April launch. A depositor choosing the Pro over the Max is choosing on the word “Premium” and nothing else.
The Chinese reference points do not help as much as they should. XGIMI launched the AURA3 line in China on 29 April, and the base model was quoted there at 6,000 ISO lumens with 10,000:1 contrast and 99 percent of BT.2020. The Western Max is quoted at 5,700 and 8,000:1 against 110 percent of BT.2020 — a lower brightness, a lower contrast, and a color number that is higher only because it is measured against a different volume. Those sheets describe different trims of a shared platform, and until XGIMI says which trim is which, the safest reading is that the black bar is not hiding a bigger number than the one already on ProjectorScreen.
What to watch between now and 20 October
This is the second time in a fortnight that a flagship ultra short throw has entered a new market through a crowdfunding page rather than a shop. AWOL put the Aetherion on Makuake in Japan in August, four months after the same machine was already shipping in America. XGIMI’s US operation, which is now carrying the company while its domestic business shrinks, is doing the same thing with the AURA 3. A Kickstarter for hardware that has been on sale in China since spring is not fundraising. It is a way of finding out what the market will pay before publishing a figure that has to be defended in a shop.
The show floor is the near-term test. CEDIA runs through Friday and IFA opens in Berlin on the fourth, and both machines will be sitting in front of dealers and reviewers who can point a meter at a wall. The claim that would actually separate them is native contrast at 4K/120 with the iris doing its work, measured rather than stated, and no one has that for either projector yet. Anyone comparing this class of machine can see where the current field sits in our 2026 ultra short throw guide. Until somebody publishes a measurement, the two boldest ultra short throws of the season are asking to be judged on a specification neither of them will print.
