XGIMI’s TITAN Noir went on sale in Japan on Thursday morning, and the price it left blank five weeks ago turned out to be about half of the sticker. The three-model series opened on the Makuake crowdfunding platform at 11:00 Tokyo time with a 72-hour tier that runs until 10:59 on Sunday, September 27: ¥489,800 for the TITAN Noir Max, ¥449,800 for the Pro and ¥379,800 for the base TITAN Noir, tax included, against Japanese list prices of ¥999,800, ¥849,800 and ¥699,800.
Those are discounts of 51, 47 and 46 percent, and the tiers are not capped by quantity. Backers who pay inside the window are promised delivery by the end of November; the campaign itself runs until December 17. The launch was first detailed by AV Watch on Monday and confirmed in XGIMI Japan’s press release, which set the funding goal at a token ¥1 million.
The hardware is the same series that has been shipping in the United States since June. The Max is rated at 7,000 ISO lumens and 10,000:1 native contrast, the Pro at 6,000 lumens and 8,000:1, the base model at 4,800 lumens and 7,000:1. All three use a Nichia RGB triple-laser light source, a 0.98-2.0:1 optical zoom, lens shift of ±130% vertical and ±50% horizontal, and twin 12W Harman/Kardon speakers in an 8.1kg chassis. Only the Max ships with the leather carry case in Japan; Pro and base buyers can add one for ¥29,800.
Cheaper than Kickstarter, once you take out the tax
When we covered the Japanese launch date in August, the open question was whether Makuake backers would get something close to the April Kickstarter pricing or something anchored to the American list. The answer is the former, and then a little more.
At Wednesday’s rate of about 158 yen to the dollar, the 72-hour prices work out to roughly $3,097 for the Max, $2,844 for the Pro and $2,402 for the base model. Japanese retail prices include the 10 percent consumption tax, while American prices are quoted before sales tax, so the fair comparison strips it out: about $2,816, $2,586 and $2,183. The Kickstarter tiers that launched the series were $2,999, $2,699 and $2,499. On a like-for-like basis, Japan’s early buyers are paying less than the backers who funded the product, by $183 on the Max, $113 on the Pro and $316 on the base TITAN Noir.
The gap is widest on the cheapest model, and that is not an accident of exchange rates. On Kickstarter the base model’s discount against its $3,999 retail price was 37.5 percent, well short of the Max’s 50. In Japan the three discounts are bunched between 46 and 51 percent, which pulls the entry model down harder than the others. Even with Makuake’s 2.2 percent payment fee added back and tax left in, the base TITAN Noir lands at roughly $2,455, still under what American backers paid.
The list prices, by contrast, are almost exactly the American ones. Stripped of tax, ¥999,800 is about $5,748 and ¥849,800 about $4,886, against $5,999 and $4,999 in the US; the base model’s ¥699,800 comes to about $4,023, a rounding error away from the $3,999 it was launched at. XGIMI has not set a separate Japanese price level so much as converted the American one and applied a crowdfunding discount on top.
What Americans pay now
The US store has moved since August. On Thursday, us.xgimi.com was quoting $5,999 for the Max, unchanged, but $4,249 for the Pro and $3,299 for the base model, both marked down from $4,999 and $3,999. So the flagship, the model XGIMI is discounting most aggressively in Japan, is the one it has not cut at home at all.
That leaves a spread that is hard to explain to an American shopper this week. A buyer in Osaka can put a TITAN Noir Max on order for the equivalent of about $3,100 with tax; a buyer in Ohio pays $5,999 plus tax for the same box. On the base model the difference is about $900. Crowdfunding windows are designed to produce exactly this kind of number, and XGIMI will point out that Makuake backers wait until late November and accept the platform’s terms rather than a retail return policy. But the 72-hour tiers carry no quantity limit, which makes them less a reward for early risk than a four-day sale.
The bench numbers Japan already has
Unlike the Kickstarter crowd in April, Japanese buyers get to read independent measurements before they pay. Testing published in June put the Max at 4,538 lumens in Filmmaker Mode, with the headline 7,000 reachable only in a Performance mode that measured far higher than any viewing mode. Native contrast climbed from 1,871:1 with the iris wide open to 9,012:1 at the tightest f/7.0 stop, close to the 10,000:1 rating but only at the setting where the picture is dimmest. XGIMI’s own Japanese footnote now says as much: the 10,000:1 figure is specified at f/7.0 and a 0.98:1 throw ratio.
Putting that condition in the press release itself, in a market where the TITAN Noir will be shopped against Sony, JVC and Epson home cinema models, is a small but correct change in how XGIMI sells the product.
Makuake has become the laser startups’ Japanese storefront
XGIMI is not the first Chinese-built projector brand to use Makuake as a launch pad, and the platform is starting to look like the default route into Japan for machines above ¥300,000. AWOL Vision opened its Aetherion ultra short throw series there in August at ¥369,800, and the campaign passed ¥400 million in backing last week, with AVAC stores now running hands-on demos. XGIMI’s own Elfin Flip campaign closed on July 23 with ¥934.7 million from 8,334 backers, which XGIMI says ranks first in Makuake’s history.
The attraction for the brands is obvious: a crowdfunding page gives a foreign company a Japanese-language storefront, a delivery schedule it controls and a reason for the tech press to cover a launch, without first signing up electronics chains. The TITAN Noir campaign also sells the accessories that would otherwise need a retail partner, including a 100-inch high-gain ALR screen at ¥99,800 and a 120-inch version at ¥159,800.
What the campaign page does not yet show is what the three projectors will cost after Sunday morning. If the post-window tiers stay near the 72-hour ones, the TITAN Noir will have launched in Japan at a lower real price than anywhere else it is sold, and the $5,999 Max on XGIMI’s American store will look increasingly like a list price nobody is meant to pay. For shoppers weighing it against other triple-laser machines at home, our 2026 laser projector guide covers the alternatives, and the AWOL LuxVision and XGIMI Aura 3 pricing shows how quickly this segment has moved since spring.
