OK, so these are my first impressions after removing the Pimax box from the shipping carton…
The box is good. It’s of a solid construction, well made, and doesn’t seem cheap at all. There is no fastening catch or anything to keep it closed, but the carry handle kinda does that for you.
First thing you see after opening the box, is an A4 sized page. It’s a note of special thanks from the CEO Robin Weng. It’s personally signed by him too. Not just a printed copy of his signature, no, this is a real penned signature. Either his hand must have hurt after doing one for each 8K-X, or he really got some intern to forge it. Lol! 
Next there is a square board resting on top of the items inside. The board has some foam sections, so it’s kinda like a lid to help protect the HMD, but is separate from the rest of the box.
Removing that lid, on the very top is a D-shaped box that has the 5m cable in. It’s wound around an insert that helps to keep the cable tidy. The insert slides out easily, and then you can unwind the cable. The cable is already attached to the HMD, if you were wondering.
Under the cable-tidy in the central cavity, there are spaces for other items, although I’m not sure what should be there. Maybe the eye tracking? Or something else? The slots are not big enough for the hand tracking though. Also in the centre is a round cardboard tube that contains the silicon protective sleeve, tightly wrapped up in the tube. The cardboard is of the same quality as the rest of the box, so nothing like a toilet paper tube!
The insert that forms the inside part of the box is glued in, so don’t go trying to pull it up to see if anything is underneath, as it won’t come out.
Plugging the three connectors in is a breeze. 1x DP, 1x USB 2.0 and 1x USB 3.0, as expected. Seems my HMD was already turned on, as when I plugged it all in, my PC immediately started to install drivers for the HMD and USB audio, and the displays came on. I already had the latest PiTool running, so that probably helped.
The only ‘instructions’ in the box were some quick ‘get PiTool here’ & ‘get support here’ in rather bad English, on a piece of card used to protect the lenses in the HMD.
Adjusting the Standard Modular Audio Strap (SMAS) was a little ‘odd’ for me. I’ve never tried anything like this before (only ever used the cloth strap from the loan 5K+) and with no instructions, I had to figure out where the back part was supposed to be on the back of my head. At first it didn’t seem to want to go low enough and was quite high on the back, but after a bit of fiddling about I realised that the cable grip on the left side was stopping it. After feeding the cable through a bit more, the back part lowered down to a comfortable position.
So, what does it look like inside?
As yet, I’ve not changed any settings from the default, so I’m sure things can be tweaked to look even better. I did find that the vertical sweetspot was quite small, a fraction up or down could put things slightly out of focus for me, so the HMD needs to be in just the right position on my head, but that’s just me and I may need to do some more adjusting.
I’ve tried things in both the Native 4K @75Hz and the upscaled @118Hz. I would have liked to see options for lower refresh rates in the upscaled mode as I have some older hardware, but things still ran well.
Oh, just so you know, I’m running an old AMD FX9590BE and a Sapphire Pulse Radeon Vega 56 GPU. Not great I know, I’m just waiting for the new stuff to come out later this year to upgrade. Still, even with this spec, my experiences with the 8K-X were fine. When starting PiTool, it does popup a message telling my GPU is, ahem, a bit crap.
I should also note that I don’t have any lighthouses or controllers, so my choice of testing titles is limited.
OK, so, the clarity is amazing, much better than the 5K+ loaner I had. SDE is ‘almost’ gone. I say almost, because I can still see it on bright areas sometimes, like the sun in the default planetscape, but only just. In all other areas, it’s invisible to me.
I do see aliasing, but like I said, I’ve not changed any default settings yet. To be honest, I’m not even sure what to change or where to change them to make things look better. (Yes, yes, I’m a noob! 
)
Blacks are about what you’d expect for an LCD panel. Not perfect, but after playing for a while I didn’t notice anymore. Colours are also pretty good. I’m red/green colour blind with certain shades, but I found things to be fine for me.
First, I tried Bigscreen Beta, and some of the smaller text can be difficult to read in both modes, but definitely easier to read in native than upscaled.
In upscaled mode, I quickly tried watching the Doctor Who channel in the TV section, and it was playing an old fourth Doctor episode, so the image quality wasn’t going to be DVD quality. The auditorium theatre I was sitting in though, was very clear and felt like I was in a cinema, watching Tom Baker on the big screen. 
I didn’t notice any SDE though, so that was good. I then tried the new Jackie Chan movie (The Iron Mask) and that was fine too.
In native mode, I tried The Iron Mask again. Picture quality was way better, so I tried a 3D movie, Alita: Battle Angel. Again picture was great for a VR headset. Still not quite as good as monitor, but only just.
As for audio, music in the movies was ok, but not great, and voices were a bit flat. I tried the freebie software ‘Sheef - Together EP’ (a VR music video), and the music sounded good in that.
So, next I tried Elite Dangerous.
In upscaled mode, again small text was difficult to read, but the game in general looked ok. Maybe a little better than the 5K+, and the absence of SDE helped a lot.
In native mode, again it was way better, with small text quite readable. Frame rate inside stations wasn’t very good, but outside and dogfighting was fine.
In-game audio was terrible though, definitely not enough bass. I’ll need my good pair of headphones for this game for certain. I hope the KDMAS headphones are good too, as these basic ones are not great at voice and game sounds, at least for the ones I’ve tried, and not for my ears.
Now, after a while writing this, I decided to give Elite another go, and played around with some settings to see if I could improve visual quality. Short answer is, oh yes I can! In both modes, I upped the Supersampling and HMD Quality settings. I set Supersampling to x1.25 and HMD Quality to x2.0. If I put supersampling any higher, I started getting weird frame rate anomalies with the picture jumping around the screen. Again, I’m assuming this is down to my old Vega GPU. Well, all text was vastly improved in both modes, to practically monitor level of ‘perfect’. This seems to be mostly due to the HMD Quality setting, but the supersampling helped with the general graphical quality overall, and reducing aliasing. I think tweaking settings in PiTool and Steam will also help with this, I’m just not sure how to go about it as I’ve never done it before.
When I was first playing about with the HMD, there were a couple of times in native mode, where if I turned my head too fast, the image would move ok, but a line of bright pixels would be shown on the leading edge. So if I moved my head up fast, a line of bright pixels would show at the top. Only for a fraction of a second though. It was like the frame rate didn’t keep up, so when the frame moved down the display, a blank line was shown. It wasn’t often, and I don’t remember what I was trying at the time, but I’m going to put it down to my Vega 56 GPU not quite being up to the task. It never happened in upscaled mode, and didn’t happen in Elite Dangerous in either mode. (Note: After trying Elite again with the supersampling settings, this problem returned in native mode, so yeah, I’m sure it’s due to my GPU).
The other thing I noticed very quickly is how hot it gets. Not the usual face sweats, I mean the HMD itself (although it getting hot makes my face hot too, while the 5K+ never did). It gets hottest just to the left of where the top head strap loops through it, but with prolonged use (30+ mins) I found the heat would spread over to the other side as well. Now I live in a (somewhat) temperate country (the UK) and the temp today was around 22C where I live. I can imagine if this is used in hotter countries, and/or for long periods, it could potentially cause heat damage to the HMD itself. I would certainly recommend using it in cooler climates or a colder, air conditioned room.
The face foam is comfortable, but I think I have a smaller head, as light was leaking in on the sides where the foam was too wide for my face. It wasn’t much, but noticeable when you looked for it. In game, and watching a movie, I didn’t notice it at all though. Thankfully, I’ve had no light leak from the nose area like some others have reported.
I also think I need the thicker face foam, as the picture clarity was better if I moved the HMD away from my face by a small amount.
I did see a weird ‘mirroring’ effect on the very left outer edge of the left display. I believe some others have also reported this. It was like the image had started to repeat. I suppose it could be a problem with the very edge of the lens, or the lens profile not quite right, but it wasn’t easy for me to tell what the cause was by looking to my extreme left. However, while it was bad when I looked for it, it didn’t bother me while playing, and I forgot about it. But I know it will bother some people, so I’m just letting you know what I’ve experienced.
Well, that’s kinda it really, my first impressions.
TLDR;
Pros
- Personally signed note from Robin Weng.
- Box is well made.
- Only the HMD, with 5m cable, and silicone protective sleeve.
- Clarity is amazing
- ‘Almost’ zero SDE. Rare and very situational.
Cons
- No other items in the box. No cleaning cloth, no real instructions.
- Sweetspot seems small.
- Aliasing is apparent at default. Can be greatly improved with settings tweaks.
‘Frame shift’ in 4K native mode, leaving bright pixels at edges. It’s due to my old GPU though.
Some kind of ‘mirror’ aberration on extreme left of the left panel, like image is starting to be repeated. Very noticeable only if you look for it.
HMD gets quite hot on the top side, just to the left of the central head strap.
Light leaks at sides, but could just be my smaller head.
No light leak at nose for me.
Sound is good/ok for music, just about acceptable for voices, but wasn’t great for game sounds.