LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyPremium home theater projectors often come at premium prices, usually north of $10,000. The Xgimi Titan Noir Max is different. It’s priced at $5,999, well under five figures, but it supports IMAX Enhanced mode and has outstanding picture quality, a 10,000:1 native contrast ratio, 7,000 lumens brightness, and a unique dual intelligent iris system that makes on-the-fly adjustments.
Even though Xgimi has been around for more than a decade and is known for affordable home cinema models, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign for the high-end Titan Noir Max home theater projector and raised $19 million. In testing, it blasted through my benchmarks, edging out even top models like the Epson Pro Cinema LS9000 and the Leica Cine Play 1 that fall into the same price range. It only faltered a bit when I tried watching evening scenes from movies like Awake and Tron: Ares in a bright and sunny room.
Photograph: John BrandonWhile any step-up in quality would likely call for names like JVC or Sony and a professional install that involves wiring and mounting on a ceiling, the long-throw Xgimi Titan Noir Max just sits on a table. It’s consumer-friendly but is highly configurable with advanced features. What really sets it apart is its inky black for movies that creates more of a true home theater look.
I chuckled about the four adjustable legs on the Titan Noir Max at first, mostly because I wondered why no other projector company in my recent memory had tried that. With four legs, you can adjust the projector image up and down or even at an angle. For example, if the projector sits to the side of your couch on a table, you can angle it and adjust the legs as needed. Most projectors I’ve tested recently only have adjustable front legs.
Photograph: John BrandonThe projector comes in a hard shell carrying case and is all black with silver accents. Xgimi offers a stand for $399, but I skipped that and just used a small table. One surprise is that this model runs on a basic version of Google Android. That means once you go through the setup, auto keystoning, and choosing the picture-quality settings you want, the projector doesn’t run on an OS that lets you stream any content. The assumption is that you will connect your own AV receiver, streaming devices, or a 4K Ultra BluRay player. I am OK with that because most high-end home cinema projectors don’t have streaming built in. There’s also no internal OS to cause any slowdowns or excess lag for gaming. It meant I could use a Google TV streamer, an Xbox Series X, and my own AV receiver for DTS:X surround sound. I wasn’t able to get Dolby Atmos passthrough surround sound audio to work with my Onkyo TX-RZ50, though.
Configuring the Titan Noir Max settings took less than five minutes. I mainly used a simple keystoning function to size the image to my projector screen. I do like how the Leica Cine Play 1 automatically sizes the image, but the simple keystoning and focus options on the Titan were so easy and quick that it didn’t matter all that much. It took far more time to adjust the keystone on the much fussier Epson LifeStudio Grand Plus projector.
You don’t need to be a certified projector installer to configure the advanced settings on the Titan Noir Max, and they are all optional tweaks anyway. However, I enjoyed poking around—for example, I did a deep dive on the DBLE (or Dynamic Black Level Enhancement) setting that reduces brightness to make blacks look richer. I also enabled the automatic iris control, which instantly adjusts colors and contrast for the current scene.
My main discovery is that the Titan Noir Max performed nicely without having to tweak too many of these settings, but you can make even more adjustments for deeper blacks. That seems to be the main calling card, since Xgimi’s marketing phrase for this projector is “absolute black.” You can also manually adjust the F-stop. For example, using F2.0 will work best in a dark room, but increasing to F5.6 worked better in a bright room where you need more contrast.
This model exceeds the DCI-P3 and Rec.2020 color gamut spec. Interestingly, even though this is a triple laser RGB projector, once I enabled an anti-rainbow setting (called Anti-RBE), I never noticed any rainbow effects. Also, the projector is incredibly quiet since the enclosure is so well-designed. Perched on four legs, there’s plenty of room for ventilation.
Photograph: John BrandonThe Titan Noir Max remote is slim and well-designed in terms of basic functions like volume control and settings. Since the projector doesn’t let you stream using a built-in OS, I found the four “shortcut” buttons to be confusing. They allow you to quickly change settings like iris control, but I prefer when remotes just have a Netflix or Prime button.
On the back of the Titan Noir Max, there’s a digital optical out, two USB ports (one for an external disk loaded with movies and one for trickle-charging gadgets), three HDMI ports (including one for eARC passthrough audio), one 3.5 mm audio out, and an Ethernet port. The projector uses Wi-Fi 6 for good compatibility, and I never had any connectivity issues.
Because the Titan Noir Max doesn’t have built-in streaming, I connected a Google TV streamer to actually watch movies on the projector. You can pick up a 4K streaming device like the Fire TV Stick 4K Max for as little as $60, so it’s not actually that much of an issue.
For benchmark tests, the Titan Noir Max performed better than most recent projectors I’ve tested. A skin tone test looked varied and warm, showing how different complexions should be distinct instead of too similar. A scene with a fence in winter that has green flecks of grass looked about the same or even slightly better than on the Leica Cine Play 1. Televisions with so-so contrast tend to make the grass in that segment look too brown and washed out.
Next, I started testing movies. I’m a sucker for just about any Pixar film, but the recent Hoppers release on the Disney+ app blew me away on this projector. It’s extremely colorful, crisp, and clear, with rich inky blacks and vivid contrast that reminded me of seeing the movie in the theater. There’s a scene early in the movie that shows a young child and her grandma with matching freckles, sitting near a river with a blue sky in the background. It’s mesmerizing. Of all of my tests, this was the proof I needed: The picture quality is outstanding.
Photograph: John BrandonTo test deep blacks, I enabled DBLE and played around with even more settings, including those for noise reduction and sharpness. My favorite sci-fi film for testing deep blacks is The Creator, particularly an early-morning scene in the movie. Every television and projectors with poor contrast and brightness renders this clip as washed out, but the Titan Noir Max made the blacks and dark grays look rich without a hint of poor contrast, helped mostly by the dynamic iris and DBLE.
That said, the Titan Noir Max didn't pass every 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 does a better job with focus across the entire image. While the Titan Noir Max still looked phenomenal, bright, and colorful in a scene with whale-like creatures on a sunny day, the LS9000 beats it in terms of pure resolution and extreme focus. That particular scene looked roughly the same on the Leica Cine Play 1 as the Titan with vivid colors.
And then I started testing in a brightly lit room. Many projectors, including the Leica Cine Play 1, do not perform well in a bright room. The Titan Noir Max was still impressive during battle scenes in the movie War Machine on Netflix, especially when the action is outdoors. I also watched Unbroken and the colors were still vivid and not washed out. However, in the darkest scenes of the movie Awake, which takes place at night, the picture quality was not great. Both Awake and Tron: Ares looked spectacular in a dark room, but washed out in a sunny room.
I was mostly sold on the picture quality in a dark room but wanted to test the dynamic iris even more. That’s where the game 007: First Light on the Xbox came in handy. There’s a mind-blowing section late in the game on a boat with colorful flowers that looked eye-poppingly real at 120 inches on my projector screen. The max size for this model is 300 inches, or big enough to project onto a double stall garage door. I didn’t try that because, at 18 pounds, the Titan Noir Max isn’t that portable.
The colors adjusted lightning fast in a nighttime segment during First Light, changing from bright sun to misty clouds and a few darker shadows. The Titan Noir Max constantly and instantly adjusts for these tonal variations. You can hear the iris adjusting faintly if you enable that feature, which I enjoyed but others might find irritating. With all of the gunfire in the game or during a chaotic movie like Hoppers, you won’t ever hear the iris.
Photograph: John BrandonI went through a barrage of PC gaming tests starting with Crimson Desert connected to a laptop. The Titan Noir Max supports 240Hz at 1080p, but you do have to fuss with some settings on the projector (like enabling game mode and turning the motion-processing feature MEMC off). At the higher refresh rate, every nudge on my Xbox controller for a PC felt immediate with no lag. The gacha game NTE also felt responsive during fight scenes, and I tested Forza Horizon 6 as well, gazing at a Nissan sports car in full and vivid color on the big screen. I noticed the lag was almost nonexistent, which is unusual for a high-end cinema projector.
Next, I watched the NBA playoffs using the YouTube TV app and, once again, the dynamic iris kicked in to make sure the colors popped. I was surprised at how inky black the screen looked during the preshow announcements with the lights off in the stadium. During the game, the jersey colors looked clear and vivid, even if I missed seeing my beloved Timberwolves.
News broadcasts using YouTube TV also had a cinematic vividness to them, as though you are watching CBS News at a movie theater instead.
In the end, the Xgimi Titan Noir Max excels as a home theater projector for movies and TV shows. If your goal is to make a movie like Hoppers look colorful with deep blacks like you're watching at the local cineplex, this projector is one of 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 drawback is image quality might suffer if you use the projector in a brightly lit room.
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