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
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.
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.
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.
Now set your google calendar in january to look back at this post
I don’t know this Bradley guy, I don’t follow much youtubers, too old for that sh*t, lol. But in this case the odds of being right are really in his favor.
I very much have hope for Q4 launch of the 12K. I think Pimax can and will deliver. I think they’ll be some SNAFUs as with any product and any launch - but they’ll be resolved by a great team that listens and responds. The trade-in program is brilliant for so many reasons - it creates a natural soft-launch, it builds loyalty in a field that’s going to get very crowded soon, it naturally lends to the customer base that are early-adopters, and it provides refurbishment opportunities for other new users and builds on the modularity of Pimax. The $100 (discounted) lighthouse mask is also brilliant.
I get what Pimax’s COO is saying. It’s incremental. Bigger displays, bigger bandwidth, bigger lenses. Weight is my biggest concern as I don’t know what progress is being made there as compared to the 8KX, but I suppose the heat sinks and lens designs may reduce it. I still have concerns about bandwidth, Tobii support, refresh rates…
But I’m sure that’s what the team literally has a job for - to figure that out! That really does put Pimax on the frontier. Despite the hype, it is what Pimax is promising - a frontier being tamed! Every time someone goes into the frontier those of us staying behind are going to say “how are they possibly going to do that” - else we’d be doing it right?
Thank you Pimax!
Do it for the love of VR!
I too would like something to show progress on the 12K of course. A bit like asking the frontiersman for a postcard.
A bit like asking the frontiersman for a postcard.
Look forward to a teardown vid some day. 
