I ordered BSB in mid November (USA order via forwarder), got on 15 May. Having it for a month now.
So just wanted to share impressions and experience with it.
Overall impressions are positive. I switched to use this hmd as a daily driver although having some issues with it which I cover below.
First I’ll talk about visuals:
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Image is very consistent, no mura, no scan lines, no different colors visual difference as it was in first oleds when eg red pixels were more distinguished as others. Very homogeneous picture.
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no any distortions, barrel effects etc, the geometry is stable.
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I also didn’t notice any chromatic aberration, but some ppl mention it, probably due to wrong fit / tilting , other issues.
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resolution wise in 75hz mode it’s very sharp, Q3 feels really blurry in comparison to this resolution. It’s my sharpest hmd so far, at this point I would say this is first hmd I feel I don’t need more resolution wise, it’s fine for reading, productivity, watching movies & other stuff.
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No issues with stereo overlap artefacts at all (e.g. I had issues with vive pro 2 & Q3 feels worse in this regard, but still ok).
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FOV for me feels very good, it’s proper oval form and perceived very natural. When you are in a dark environment, due to Oled you start forget about FOV at all as blacks merge. I have no any issues with the FOV, I didn’t like vive pro 2 FOV, also old hmds like cv1, vive also while were ok you felt lack of FOV, with BSB I find FOV enjoying, it’s less than on index, but I can’t say I feel any significant difference with the Q3.
My values with gasket and without the gasket:
https://andreasaronsson.com/!apps/wimfov/?id=47b8bf9b
https://andreasaronsson.com/!apps/wimfov/?id=3d7db02f
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Sweetspot is small but is bigger for me than G2, if you wear default gasket and if gasket is manufactured correctly the sweet spot isn’t an issue at all, it sticks to your face and auto positions itself, thought if you use halo mod of bd man strap mod the sweetspot starts to annoy, but if it’s productivity or movies it’s totally fine and nose bridge mod helps to keep it in spot.
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edge to edge clarity in my case is quite decent, everybody complains about it but for me it’s better than Q2, it’s ofc not a Q3 level, but it’s definitely not bad as we used to have in old htc pro hmds & the rest, if you look straight everything is very clear as in Q3, if you start to look aside it starts to degrade, e.g. 55-60% horizontally of screen is clear (if you look straight the whole image perceived as fully clear) then when you look at 60-80% range horizontally you see quite clear but one of your eyes gets out of focus and you feel slight discrepancy in the eye, similar feeling to pimax old hmds (5k+, 8kx) when both eyes aren’t clear at once (again this happens only when glancing aside, when looking straight the optical comfort is good and both eyes see clear simultaneously). At 80-100% it’s blurry, you see shapes and can distinguish text words but can’t read them. Vertically thought it’s very clear, like 5%-95% is clear the only downside is that at top and bottom of you glance there is a light pink tint coz lenses are not big and it alters white colours a bit, but it’s quite slight and is not bothering, when you see straight you don’t see this pink tint.
I was very pessimistic when read reviews about e2ec but to my surprise it was quite decent experience and after 1-2 weeks picture becomes even better as brain does it’s job to process image accordingly. -
I use refresh rate at 75Hz, Oled has faster response time and 75 Oled feels way better than old 90hz pimax hmds, I usually used 90 on index, rarely 120, I even didn’t experiment with the 90 BSB mod as I don’t feel I need it at all.
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Glare wise it’s like 115% of index level, if your lenses are clear (no oil, moisture etc), in many scenes it’s not bothering at all, sometimes it pops up but not an issue for me, although ofc I would like to avoid that if possible. If you hate index glare you won’t cope with it as well.
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first significant negative was the brightness, it was very dim (@100%) at first and I was worried, at 150% it is bright but smearing was very awful, at 100 you notice the smearing as on old oleds, mb a bit less. In a one week I got used and eyes adapted so brightness became quite ok honestly, now I use it at 70-80% and smearing is not an issue. So now I don’t consider it as a significant con
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another note the panels are quite warm colour wise, colours feel ok, there are no issues like on old pimax hmds with saturation etc, it’s just warm, some ppl prefer more cold displays.
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blacks are truly oled blacks, I missed it so many years.
All those points that I mentioned you need to consider only in case if your ipd is correct and eye relief is also as best as possible (distance between your eyes and lenses). If you have wrong fit your visuals will be awful.
Ipd for this hmd is hard to select properly, so most probably you will face a need to swap hmd several times (free and support is good). For me though I got the right fit with the first attempt as I read all reviews and made my own conclusions. So on all hmds I have 67.5-68, here I needed 65 ipd plate with the BSB, the hmd has 1.5m focal length and your eyes tend to converge more inward than on other hmds with 2-3m focal length, what I did is I used iOS app that measures ipd, I focused at 1.5m far object, looking at the object I made a screenshot of app results and my near ipd was 66.2, so I still substracted 1.2 mm and chosen 65, it was on the edge for me, 1mm more and my eyes wouldn’t be in focus simultaneously in case of straight gaze due to big space between lense centers.
Now about the comfort:
I have severe issues with nerve system and my face nerves are very sensitive. The comfort out of the box was a nightmare for me. Gasket touches your eye sockets and I could use hmd for 4-6 hrs max then got headaches, apart of nerves it’s a sealed space and even with 100% hmd’s fan it was quite hot, not immediately, but after 4 hrs of play you start to feel irritation under the gasket as sweet gets accumulated and it’s very warm as well, eyes also feel fatigue due to heat. On top of all the lenses moisture accumulation also was very bad in my experience. I wipe index once a day, Q3 once per 2-3 weeks and BSB I had to wipe around 4-6 times a day.
So I modded hmd to halo option with a nose bridge (you can find all mods refs in remix section Bigscreen beyond nose bridge gasket by pruban - Thingiverse )
After the mods, I have no issues with heat, no more face strain, and eyes are also fine. Moisture problem became same level as on index, so no issue here. And wow only then I could realize how light the hmd is, when your comfort is good and you have no strain spots issues, it’s literally weightless, I had no this feeling with any of others hmds, so this was the main selling point for me along with oled and native steamvr headset. That’s a truly underestimated feature.
For audio I opted to soft strap tiny speakers similar to quest concept, to not increase the weight. Before was using hd-650, it is very ok but I don’t like to add any not mandatory weight to the hmd this light
You need to join Discord server to see the link, it is public now Discord (invite Bigscreen Beyond)
Here is the picture of the audio mod
To summarize I would say this is quite unique hmd and is very decent, so it requires tinkering and comfort fixes, but it’s designed very clever and lets you to do so, helping with chosen design decisions (like quests were very mods friendly). If you spent your time this hmd makes very serious competition and outclasses every product comfort wisely. I’m a bit spoiled now by the hmd’s weight & other bigger hmds look to me unnatural.
I would definitely recommend it to ppl who like oled and had always issues with vr comfort, and couldn’t use vr for a long time.
For casual users I wouldn’t bother and recommend Q3/index still, BSB only if you have issues with comfort with them, coz the entry level for this headset is more taught, though if you fix the issues the experience is awesome. Some new vr users buy BSB and enjoy it, even some who try vr for the first time fall in love with it but many (majority? it looks so for me) users have issues and they don’t want or don’t know how to fix it (many of them still continue to use it with the issues but they could fix it & enjoy the hmd to a full potential). So if you’re buying BSB you 60-80% will face issues & will need to fix them to get your experience enjoyable / great.
Few other points:
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tracking is less polished than index, it’s totally fine, but steamvr drivers or soft just aren’t polished enough, it’s fine and better than on old pimaxes for sure, the issues are mostly like it’s more prone to reflecting surfaces, rf interference, usb power and so on, nothing deal breaking, just a less polished xp than index.
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same for steamvr firmware, it is no where as bad as quest soft or old pitool bugs, but it’s just less polished, some minor things like when you don’t use controllers for productivity and controllers switch off due to timeout the hmd greys out, if you switch controllers on and manually turn them off, tracking continues working & you’re fixed, and similar not deal breaking minor edge cases, I’m sure those will be addressed over the time.
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also I have only one severe issue that limits BSB usage for me, due to nerves issues I can’t use ordinary monitors as looking to close objects causes strong headache for me, as BSBs focal length is less than ordinary vr headsets it causing me to strain nerves more, so sometimes I can use it for 5-6hrs, sometimes for 12hr & then usually head/eyes pressure raises, Q3 / index were not an issue for me at all even after 16 hrs of usage straight. But as long as you can work with monitors I guess that point is not relevant for you. Otherwise I’m very pleasant with this purchase. This is the only real con for me.
Thanks for reading.
