GoKawiilThe Titan Noir Max has a subtle, classy design with a grey metal chassis, front grill and understated red ring around the lens, along with Harman Kardon and gold "IMAX Enhanced" logos. The projector is around the same size as the rival Valerion VisionMaster Max, but sits on tube-like feet that give it a slightly alien appearance. It ships with an elegant carrying box and comes with a nice looking, silver-accented remote.
I set up the Titan Noir Max in my living room with a 120-inch matte projector screen to avoid the "laser speckle" that can happen with ALR (ambient light reflecting) screens. With a 0.98-2.0x zoom lens, this projector offers a highly flexible setup distance of 8.7 to 17.4 feet from screens up to 300 inches in size. It supports a wide lens shift range as well (50 percent horizontal and 130 percent vertical), so you can set the projector well off center with no need to use distorting digital keystone correction.
At the same time, it does have an automatic keystone setup that lets you just point the projector near the middle of your screen and press a button to fit the image if you don't want to fuss. That worked well for me, but I needed to adjust the image to get it relatively close to the screen size first. Auto screen adjustment was easier with Anker's Nebula X1 or the VisionMaster Max, working on both of those models as long as the image size was larger than the screen.
The Titan Noir Max comes with three HDMI 2.1 ports, including one with eARC for a sound bar, along with S/PDIF optical, USB-A, a 3.5mm audio output and a gigabit ethernet connection. It lacks the Nebula X1's liquid cooling but it's nearly as quiet — I measured fan noise at a very minimal 18db from two feet away, or 24db when brightness was pushed to the maximum.
Unlike rivals, the Titan Noir Max lacks Google TV or another built-in smart TV service. To use platforms like Netflix and Disney+, you'll need to purchase an Apple TV 4K, Google TV or other streaming device. This didn't bother me as I had a spare Google TV stick, which I prefer anyway because the Google TV interface that's built into some projectors can be laggy. However, the lack of any streaming access may push some folks to go with another model.