XGIMI has put a date on the Japanese launch of the TITAN Noir, its dual-iris flagship line, but not a price. The three-model series goes on pre-order through the Makuake crowdfunding platform in mid-September, the company told AV Watch on Monday, with local pricing still undisclosed and a coupon promised to anyone who registers an email address or adds the official LINE account before the campaign opens.
The lineup splits by brightness. The TITAN Noir Max sits on top at 7,000 ISO lumens and a claimed 10,000:1 native contrast; the Pro is rated at 6,000 ISO lumens and 8,000:1; the base TITAN Noir at 4,800 ISO lumens and 7,000:1. All three run the same RGB triple-laser engine — XGIMI’s Japanese materials credit Nichia for the light source — through a 0.47-inch DMD, and all three carry the feature the series is named after.
The dual iris is a pair of mechanical apertures working on the light path itself, before the beam reaches the lens, rather than the digital dimming most consumer projectors use to fake black level. XGIMI calls it the world’s first dual intelligent iris system in a consumer projector, a claim it has made consistently since the series was announced on April 23, and nobody in the category has publicly contradicted it.
What matters more than the superlative is that the iris is user-adjustable in five steps. Stop it down and the projector trades light for black level; open it up and you get the headline lumen figure back. There is also a dynamic mode that lets the projector move the iris in real time according to scene content, and a control layer XGIMI markets as Dual IrisSync, which drives the iris, the three lasers and the DMD together so that color output stays consistent as the aperture changes. Sitting on top of that is an image processor XGIMI calls X-Vision, running a black-level algorithm the company labels Dynamic Black Level Enhancement.
That is a lot of branded vocabulary for what is, mechanically, an old idea returning to a category that had mostly abandoned it. Auto irises were common on lamp-based home projectors a decade ago and fell out of favor as laser phosphor engines made dimming easier to do electronically. Putting two of them back into a laser projector is a bet that buyers at this price still judge a projector by how a letterboxed black bar looks in a dark room.
The series has been shipping in the United States since June, which means the Japanese campaign opens with independent measurements already on the record. Testing published on June 7 put the Max at 4,538 lumens in Filmmaker Mode and 4,356 in Standard, with the calibrated picture modes clustered tightly between roughly 4,350 and 4,555. The 7,000-lumen rating is reachable only in the projector’s Performance mode, which measured 11,015 lumens and 1,303 nits on a 100-inch matte white screen — well past the specification, and well past anything you would watch a film in.
The contrast numbers are the more interesting set, because they show what the iris is actually buying. Wide open at f/2.0, native contrast measured 1,871:1. Stopped to f/3.0 it reached 3,631:1, at f/4.0 5,060:1, at f/5.5 7,622:1, and at the tightest f/7.0 setting 9,012:1 — within a few percent of the 10,000:1 XGIMI advertises. The specification is not inflated so much as it is conditional: the Max hits it at the aperture where it is dimmest, and hits its brightness rating at the aperture where its blacks are worst. Buyers get to pick a point on that curve, which is a more honest arrangement than a single number implies, but it does mean the two headline figures on the box can never be true at the same time.
Color held up better. XGIMI claims 110% of BT.2020; the bench measured full coverage of the standard, which for a consumer projector is unusual and is the strongest argument for the triple-laser engine here. Input lag came in at 4ms at 4K/60, 7.3ms at 1080p/120 and 3.1ms at 1080p/240, close enough to XGIMI’s 1ms marketing figure that gamers will not notice the gap. The unit does not accept 4K/120, laser speckle was visible on some screen materials, and the power supply is a large external brick.
The specification sheet on XGIMI’s own US store lists the built-in OS as none. For a company that built its reputation on Android TV and Google TV boxes welded to the projector chassis, shipping a $5,999 model with no streaming platform at all is a deliberate reversal, and it puts the TITAN Noir in the same bracket as the JVC and Sony projectors it is aimed at rather than the smart lifestyle machines that made XGIMI’s name — the book-sized Elfin Flip 4K being the other end of that same catalog.
It is the right call for the buyer this is chasing, who already owns an Apple TV or a disc player and does not want a projector’s dated app store deciding what Netflix looks like. It is also a quiet admission about where the margins are. Everything else on the chassis points the same direction: a 0.98-2.0:1 zoom, twin 12W Harman/Kardon drivers with DTS Virtual:X, IMAX Enhanced certification on the front panel, 8.1kg on a 178 x 334 x 248mm body designed to sit on a stand rather than hide in a ceiling.
Pricing is where the Japanese campaign gets interesting. In the US, the Max lists at $5,999, the Pro at $4,999 and the base model at $3,999, with XGIMI’s store currently quoting early September shipping. The Kickstarter that launched the series in April sold the same three machines at $2,999, $2,699 and $2,499 — discounts of half or better against the eventual retail prices, which is aggressive even by crowdfunding standards and suggests the MSRP was set with a permanent gap between list and street.
Japan is getting the crowdfunding treatment too, five months later, and XGIMI has said nothing about where the Makuake numbers will land. That silence is the story. If Japanese backers see something close to the Kickstarter tier, the series arrives as a genuine bargain against domestic 4K laser competition. If Makuake pricing anchors near the US list, the same hardware becomes a hard sell in the one market where Sony and JVC sell at home. Regional pricing gaps of that size are not unusual in projection — Hisense is currently charging British and American buyers very different amounts for the same PX4-Pro — but they are usually discovered after launch, not left blank in the announcement.
For anyone weighing the TITAN Noir against the rest of the field, our 2026 laser projector guide and brand-by-brand breakdown cover the alternatives at and below this price. The specification that will decide it, though, is not on any of those pages yet: XGIMI has told Japan when, and told it what. It has not told it how much.