No. Black levels on the Pimax Vision 8kX are excellent, even better with PiTool brightness/contrast adjustments, which are much more useful now. Even the 5k+ wasn’t that bad in terms of black levels to begin with, though it always seemed rather blue shifted.
@TonytotheB Where are you in the USA?
I live in Dallas Texas but also regularly visit New York City. I trust you for sure haha but my current 5k+ has awful black levels. I even think the unit is faulty but I’ve never bothered arguing with Pimax.
I’d love to try the 8KX and then submit my order 
dont forget its lcd,it will never get good black levels…
OLED VR displays are not generally allowed to turn their black pixels completely off, due to framerate issues. Good quality OLED and LCD panels are about the same.
So far, in the 8kX, black levels are mostly affected by other bright things on the screen allowing lots of light through. I will venture well above or below the galactic plane in ED to get a better benchmark of black levels.
At the end of the day though, I haven’t cared as much about black levels as some. I will look into getting a demo of some kind in Tony’s area if possible, since he seems to be a discerning user, or at least has a comparison point of what was not acceptable to him.
maybe do a night flight in xplane 11 and see what you think about the black levels…
Ah, that’s a good test case.
Regarding ED and some of the pixelation around certain objects… NVIDIA control panel does NOT help.
But what is good is subjective. E.g. I think my 5k+ black levels are good enough (though definitely far from perfect). I don’t think I have better panel than others, just that I am not so picky about this particular feature. I don’t have any backlight bleed though, which I had on some monitors and that can ruin the experience if present.
Did a night flight carrier landing mission in DCS World (XPlane will be done later), which I would expect to be pretty much the same thing. Black levels were not totally black, I have to admit, regardless of any PiTool settings and such. But I don’t have control of the backlight among other things (because this is NOT A FINAL HEADSET OR PiTool VERSION), and things were more than dark enough to present the usual challenges of operating on instruments, watching the lighting, complete lack of terrain, etc.
Now if I still had a Vive, or I had an Odyssey+ to compare with, I would. But I have my doubts it would be much different.
Relative black levels of course (ie. stars/dark in Elite Dangerous), are nevertheless as good as I can tell, and will be investigated further beyond the galactic plane.
Thx for testing it…
Ofcourse the vive or the odyssey have far better blacks because they are oled…
But we al know the shortcomings of lcd…And also the shortcomings of oled.
Lets hope the colors and sharpnes and a smooth framerate on the 8kx makes up with that, and hopefuly a very very good audio solution with the deluxe audio MAS.
I have my doubts that OLED panels really provide significantly better blacks than LCDs, based on my experiences thus far. The flight sim at night use case is the first test I have found that could show any substantial difference.
Colors, sharpness, smooth framerate… 8kX has all these. I have more to announce after finishing up another round of testing…
It’s still a pretty big difference, even though OLEDs in VR don’t go totally black like the TV’s do. Games like Killing Floor Incursion, Arktika.1, Walking Dead Saints/Sinners, and Westworld that have very dark scenes, it basically looks like you’re looking through a cloudy haze rather than actually being in the dark like OLEDs. I still prefer LCD’s at the moment, because there aren’t any commercially viable high res OLED panels with RGB, but as soon as that’s mitigated, I’m all for jumping back to OLED.
I love oldes colors but that panels hurt my eyes. After 1h gameplay in Vive my both eyes was completly dried and I need longer breaks. In LCD no problems at all.
I never used the Vive for extended periods of time but I heard the brightness was set pretty high relative to other headsets. I never noticed any difference in eyestrain between OLEDs like Rift CV1, Quest, PSVR, or Odyssey/Odyssey+ and LCDs.
Yes brighness was a bit too high but even in “night mode” (steamvr option) high contrast in oleds makes me fell unconfortable. I have astigmatis and maybe my eys are too sesnsitive for strong light. Not going back to oleds waiting for new technology or panels generation…
Vive had a number of weak points, any one of which alone could cause severe discomfort…
In any case, this discussion has taught me about edge cases for which black levels are critically important.
Given we’re all about low persistence anyway, I wonder what sort of results Pimax could have, if they could persuade their display panel suppliers to try their hand at making them a sequential colour LCD screen, for their devices…
That should potentially be able to result in less light bleed, improved colour gamut, improved fill factor, and make room for sqrt(3) times higher resolution, using the same amount of picture elements as on a RGB matrix screen.
The front line worries are whether they can (EDIT2: …without going too far from the available components shelf) put together a diffusion layer stack and power-to-lumen-ratio-efficient edge-light strip, that can evenly spread all three different wavelength backlight colours (EDIT3: I mean, they are already there today, in the current white backlight, but those all emit from the same points - what I am worrying about is whether there could be a flame-y strobing pattern, with discrete red, green, and blue LEDs in the strip), and more so whether they can manage the colour fringing situation.
I guess /me, for one, will have an idea about that last, come summer, when Tilt-Five glasses start shipping out; If it is proves a negligible problem with their 720p over 100-ish degree FOV, I have hope. :7
(The Tilt-5:s use 60fps sequential colour LCOS projectors (so scans at 180Hz, to accomodate the RGB for each frame), and have the reprojection in firmware on-device, to compensate for head motion between fields (they also anticipate low frame rates now and again – the imagery goes over USB)).
( EDIT: About Elite:Dangerous, by the way: ED Forum grump OldDuck went on a bezerker killing spree in shader land, eradicating as much as he could of what he finds unsightly. Haven’t looked into how much more extreme fundamentalist he was about it, than our own YataPL… :7 Amazingly Realistic Immersion Mod | Frontier Forums )
Tell me friend in what systems can I meet you online in your most expensive ship ?
I knew that not-making-it-a-wink-ey-smiley at the end would come back to bite my behind. 
Regarding the shaders… I will be testing these…
Regarding sequential color LCD… doubtful at best. At VR/AR scale, RGB stripe artifacts are horrifically painful without electronics an order of magnitude faster. Such electronics either consume much more power (adding heavy heatsinks), or use the same improved manufacturing that could be used to make smaller pixels and more sophisticated optics.
Black levels in Elite Dangerous
tldr
Unless you are somewhere as far out as Beagle Point, dark patches in the Elite Dangerous background are going to look black, not grey.
Took a 1411.17ly trip above the bubble, still a bit of dim interstellar dust, but galaxies are plainly visible. Patches of black are still much, much darker, than patches of dust, even at minimum gamma setting.