I appreciate the strip-tease, shes truly sexy. But I like 12k girls.
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After I received 2 faulty aeros and witnessed quite a few people all receiving defective aeros I lost confidence in Varjo ever being able to deliver to me a fault free aero so got refunded. Under uk law if a replacement item for a defective item is also defective within the first 6 months of ownership then the purchaser is entitled to a refund.
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Was that confirmed to be the case? It may be that youtubers/reviewers etc will get a demo before proofreaders. The general public doesn’t really get demos except for at conventions of which there seems to be none between now and end of Q3.
I like girls with smaller form factors. 
Go the aspheric lenses! 
SadlyItsBradley talks about his take on the Pimax Crystal and 12K:
Bradley certainly does seem to have a rather negative view of Pimax. In the video, he questions who the Crystal is even for.
But the more interesting claim he makes is that Pimax is putting out the Crystal as a stop gap because they’re not even close to being able to release the 12K this year. So he claims Pimax put more conventional panels and optics in a 12K shell and are shoving that out the door in the meantime. He does believe that the Crystal will be released in Q3, but he says he’d be “shocked” if the 12K even released within the first half of 2023. He doesn’t believe the XR2 can handle the bandwidth requirements and that the 12K won’t be possible until a next gen snapdragon chip releases.
@PimaxUSA @PimaxQuorra @hammerhead_gal Curious what you have to say about Bradley’s claims?
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To be perfectly frank, Bradly has a terrible track record when it comes to predicting actual releases or speculating on the details around the release. There’s the infamous Valve Deckard stuff he’s been on about for a long time and he was convinced it was coming ‘soon’ last year which he eventually reigned in, there was the Vive Flow and they got the specs very wrong on that, and then there was expecting The Quest 2 Pro/Quest 3 at Facebook’s event earlier this year. He has been wrong far more than he’s been right about these things.
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LOL. Pimax is Pimax. If you’ve been long enough around here you’ll know what that means. They make huge promises and not so huge deliveries 
Some day they will release something that might or might not resemble what they initially promised, I don’t doubt that. But you can be sure about one thing: It will take WAY longer than they promised you.
2nd half of 2023 for the 12K seems about right to me. Most definitely not this year! If they’d release it earlier than Q3-23 it most likely won’t resemble very much what they promised they’d make.
The Crystal will come later this year, totally agreed. The fact that they’re now posting the components means that it’s not very far from release, probably a few months. I totally agree with that guy in the video that it won’t be a very successful product. I’m expecting a varjo Aero but just way worse quality. Pimax hasn’t released something very high quality so far so it would surprise me if they’d now all of a sudden would make something Varjo-like quality.
The whole reason they’ve been more or less successful so far is simply that there’s no competition AT ALL in that wide FoV segment for that price point. And now they’re taking up on Varjo. Even though Varjo has its own problems (dead pixels, distortion, small FoV), it’s still a very well engineered headset. I just don’t think Pimax can match that, let alone beat them.
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I recall last year just after the Pimax Frontier presentation last October Kevin posted somewhere on this forum that they also had plans for another headset in addition to the 12K, so if the Crystal is a stop gap it’s something they had plans for from the very beginning, so I doubt it is.
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An interchangable lens system is non-trivial, so I really doubt this was a last minute idea whatsoever.
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Yea i realy dont think we see the pimax 12K this year at all…Maybe summer 2023.
I hope i am wrong but i realy doubt that…
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For me the Crystal is not a stop gap, but the ultimate solution.
I don’t use VR for gaming. It’s for playing videos only, either 3D movies or pleasure videos. Therefore 12k is way overkill. Yeah, 200 degree FOV and 12K is lovely, but then I have to buy a 4090Ti for that.
With Crystal, not only I have the best quality of pictures, I have the additional freedom of standalone mode.
Playing 3D movies and 8k videos in 2880x2880 panels doesn’t require huge PCs, Snapdragon XR2 should be able to handle that gracefully. I just need to run my Stash server, and let Crystal connects to my server to browse the posters of videos. No 6G dongle, no extra $2000 to spend. I can sit on the couch and relax. The graphic will be breath-taking. What more can I ask for?
200 degree FOV of course is nice, but since I am fine with 90 ° FOV of Quest 2, I will be satisfied with Crystal too.
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The two headsets are largely the same. Features mentioned in the Crystal show were actually in drafts of Frontier but team felt it better to have some additional reveals as the release date got closer.
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That’s the primary reason why I’ve figured that Pimax announcing the Crystal was a strong indicator that both headsets are on schedule for their release dates. Because why would Pimax announce the Crystal otherwise? Bradley’s claim was the first time an alternate reason that made any sense was suggested, but that doesn’t jive with hints about “a second headset in the works” having come so early.
My own answer to this (and mind you, I was relaying Bradley’s opinions in my post, not my own) is that the Pimax Crystal is the upgrade path for Valve Index owners that the Varjo Aero isn’t. As Thrillseeker said in his review of the Aero, it’s a hard sell to Index owners because you’re gaining on display quality but losing built in audio and FOV. The Crystal, on the other hand, makes no sacrifices compared to the Index. At least on paper.
Anecdotally, my friends who have Indexes and Vive Pros are watching the Crystal launch very intently and are planning to upgrade if the reviews are good.
Based on what? How are you calculating this date estimate?
I did think it was curious in the video that initially Bradley said “multiple people” are telling him the 12K will be very late. And then he backs that off to well it’s 1-2 people “in the industry”. And maybe they don’t have sources, but they feel like its impossible for the 12K to be released in 2022.
I wondered if he was just quoting people on this forum.
I have noticed that the date estimations for the 12K (and the Crystal) here seem to follow the equation: (Pimax claimed date) X (User’s personal level of jadedness about Pimax) = Release date estimate.
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I do think that Pimax are being careful with release dates this time around, things coming super late has been possibly the biggest criticism of the company and a very pervasive one. If they release these 2 headsets on time then it would do wonders for their reputation and would be a pretty genius move. There also doesn’t seem to be any specific hardware that is super cutting edge in the headset to really delay it. That isn’t to say the headset itself isn’t cutting edge, more that if it does everything it says then it will be greater than the sum of its parts. Not any single component is super hard to source or facing massive supply issues, but putting them all together and creating the closest to a no compromise headset yet would really turn heads (in 6DOF).
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I’ve been a Pimax owner since they started the company with the Pimax 4k. Bought that headset in march 2016. After that I’ve owned the 5k, the Artisan and the 8k-X. So been following them for a while and it’s always the same with them, they always deliver WAY later than promised and the headsets always miss some of the features they promised or in many ways are not even close to what they promised (like the original 8K). Just that, combined with the fact that the promised features of the 12K are extremely ambitious AND the fact that they’ve not even started roadshows or not even have showed the headset at all, I’m quite certain we’re still a long way from the release date.
First they’ll post parts, like they did with the crystal. Then a few months later they’ll start roadshows (not sure if they’ll do that with the Crystal, but they surely will with the 12K, which will be their new flagship). Maybe CES 2023 will show the 12K if we’re lucky. And from that point to mass production and shipping out any substantial quantities could also easily take another 6 months.
And yeah @PimaxUSA will always disagree of course. He ridiculed me for example when I said here that Pimax will never open up their source code, I would be dead wrong. I knew they would never do that, I was working back then behind the scenes with Xunshu (miss her!) and she already told me that Pimax China was strongly against open source. So yeah, I take anything he claims with a huge grain of salt, he likes to suger coat reality just a bit too much
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You did come close to being right on that (a joke btw) but we did convince the team to release it close to that time: GitHub - Pimax-Tech/PiTool - it wasn’t nearly as open as we and particularly “I” would have liked but many partners did begin building their own flavors of it after that.
Let‘s see where we are when Q3 and Q4 have ended. We will be able to tell if Pimax released the headsets by then - why waste time speculating about it today. And yes, Bradley doesn‘t think very highly of Pimax, that has been the case for quite a while.
But the truly important question will be: do they deliver in satisfactory quality on the promises made, or will some specs end up like the optional eye-tracking capability of the 8KX ? Existing on paper but pretty useless in practice. These headset would be great if all of the features work, and work seamlessly together at the same time. And reliably without a greater hassle and tinkering.
If it comes in the shape as I expect it come, there will be folks who are happy to put up with the issues, nearly-good implementations and tinkering requirements, but for me having a high maintenance, and sometimes high, sometimes low return device like the 8KX is not really going to be an option. Surely not at the announced price points. But that‘s just me.
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Bradley gets his clicks by generating fake hype and controversy – like a lot of youtubers these days. He’s a bit fun to listen to his outlandish theories sometimes, and I appreciate his ability to go through patent documents. But he always seems to imagine there is some amazing product just around the corner and he fixates on certain tech (“micro oled omg omg omg”).
Frankly, Pimax doesn’t have to do anything but release the product to prove him and everyone else wrong.
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You said they were very likely to open up the drivers. I said that would NEVER happen, Pimax China is strongly against that. Pi-tool open source doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a tool to change some settings, nobody is interested in that.