XGIMI has put out Western specifications for the Aura 3 Max, an ultra short throw laser TV rated at 5,700 ISO lumens that the company says will accept 4K at 120Hz. The sheet went out on 17 August through ProjectorScreen and was picked up in Europe the following day. It arrives with a stated launch route — Kickstarter first, retail afterwards — and no price attached to either step.
The refresh rate is the part worth pausing on. Ultra short throw projectors have sat at 4K/60 for years, and the machines that broke past it were long throw. XGIMI’s answer here is two DLPC8545 controllers running in parallel behind a 0.47-inch DMD, which ProjectorScreen reckons makes the Aura 3 Max the first DLP ultra short throw to carry a genuine 4K/120 mode. The projector also lists 1080p at 240Hz, a claimed 1ms response, and Dolby Vision Gaming. The 4K/120 path is HDMI 2.1 only; USB playback is excluded from it.
Around that sits a fairly conventional 2026 flagship spec. The light engine is RGB triple laser with a claimed 110% of BT.2020. Native contrast is quoted at 8,000:1, worked by a dual mechanical iris rather than a single blade. The throw ratio is 0.163:1, which XGIMI translates into a 120-inch picture from roughly eight inches of wall clearance. Audio is an 80-watt Harman Kardon array with Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual:X. The operating system is Google TV, with Netflix included rather than sideloaded. Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10 and HLG are all on the list, along with gigabit Ethernet and eARC. The French outlet Mondoprojos, working from the same material, adds a 19-element optical assembly.
None of this is a product debut. XGIMI launched the AURA3 line at its China event on the evening of 29 April, alongside the X50 Ultra and RS30 long throw series and the MIRA 4K short throw range. The trade outlet PjTime covered the event and recorded the pitch: a body the size of a pillow, under 10kg, sold with a rollable screen up to 150 inches, and a claim that AURA3 was the industry’s first laser TV with five-figure contrast.
So the 17 August sheet is a distribution announcement dressed as a product announcement. That gap is now a pattern rather than an accident. MIRA 4K went on sale in China on 28 May; its Western counterpart surfaced in late July. The Titan Noir has been working through Japan on Makuake on a similar delay. For anyone tracking this category from outside China, the useful habit is to read the Chinese launch first and treat the English one as a shipping date.
Reading both sheets side by side turns up figures that do not line up. The April event sold AURA3 on five-figure native contrast; the August sheet for the Max says 8,000:1. The Chinese material claims 99% BT.2020 coverage on a volumetric measure; the Western material claims 110% of BT.2020, a number that means something only if you specify which volume you are measuring against, and XGIMI does not. The Chinese launch made nothing of 4K/120 at all.
The likeliest explanation is trim. Mondoprojos notes both a Max and a Pro sharing an engine and splitting on brightness and contrast, and XGIMI’s Chinese range habitually runs an Ultra Max above a Max. If the five-figure contrast belongs to a Chinese top trim that is not the machine going to Kickstarter, both sets of numbers can be true at once. XGIMI has not said so, and until it does, the 8,000:1 figure is the one attached to the product Western buyers can actually order.
Since the price is blank, the nearest thing to a guide is what happened to the MIRA. IT Home logged the Chinese launch on 28 May at 6,499 yuan for the 2,000 ISO lumen model and 7,999 yuan for the 3,000 ISO lumen Pro. The same 2,000 lumen machine is listed in the US at $1,699. Convert the yuan figure at current rates and you get somewhere near $900. Chinese retail prices carry VAT and American ones do not, and shipping a projector across the Pacific is not free, but the spread is wide enough that it is not an accounting artefact.
Apply anything like that ratio to a flagship and the Aura 3 Max is not a $2,000 projector. The Aura 2 is a second reference point: XGIMI currently lists it at $2,239 against a $2,699 sticker, and it went on preorder in China at 17,999 yuan for the 100-inch bundle with screen included.
The generational jump is unusually clean, because the Aura 2 is still on sale and still fully specified. It does 2,300 ISO lumens; the Aura 3 Max claims 5,700. It runs Android TV 11; the new one runs Google TV. It tops out at 4K/60 with a quoted 20ms of lag; the new one claims 4K/120 at 1ms. Audio goes from four 15-watt Harman/Kardon drivers to 80 watts. The throw ratio tightens from 0.177:1 to 0.163:1.
One number is conspicuously absent from the new sheet: maximum image size. The Aura 2 is specified for 90 to 150 inches. Every published figure for the Aura 3 Max stops at 120 inches, which is the size XGIMI uses to demonstrate the clearance claim rather than a stated ceiling. Given that the Chinese version ships with a 150-inch rollable option, the omission is almost certainly a marketing choice rather than a limit, but it is the kind of blank that matters if you have already bought the screen. Buyers weighing this class of machine can compare the current field in our 2026 ultra short throw guide, and the outgoing model’s full sheet is on our Aura 2 specifications page.
What is left is the crowdfunding step, and it is worth being clear about what that step is. A Kickstarter campaign for hardware that has been selling in a major market for four months is not fundraising. It is a pre-order list with a discount attached and an early-adopter audience already assembled — the same move AWOL Vision made on Makuake this week, and one that is quietly becoming the default way Chinese projector brands enter Western and Japanese markets without committing to retail pricing on day one.
That last point is the reason the missing price is interesting rather than merely annoying. Kickstarter lets XGIMI find out what the market will pay for 4K/120 in an ultra short throw before it has to publish a number it must then defend at Best Buy. With CEDIA opening in Denver on 1 September and IFA in Berlin three days later, there are two obvious stages on which to answer the question. Whether XGIMI uses either of them, or lets the campaign page do the talking, will say a good deal about how confident the company is in the figure.