Has screen-door-effect been improved throughout prototypes?

Does anyone know if the screen door effect has been improved on throughout the various prototypes of the Pimax 8k? If I recall correctly the Pimax 8k wasn’t fully utilizing the screens.

As far as I know, the SDE is basically the same for all the various 8K prototypes and M1. It should be small enough to be barely visible, if you are specifically looking for it.

Hmm…okay. The accounts of screen door effect differ quite a lot between reviews. Some people say it’s gone, and some say it’s still there.

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True SDE only really exists on OLED displays, which have largish gaps around the pixels. LCD panels have a narrow edge around the pixel, which some people call SDE.

I think the reason for the discrepancy between what people say is simply this: It’s so small that some people can’t even see it. I don’t think the panels have changed significantly between all the 8K revisions.

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The panels don’t have to necessarily change. If I recall correctly, Pimax said in the past that they weren’t utilizing all of the screen and were working on utilizing more of it. They could of moved the screen slightly further away from the lens to utilize more of the screen. By doing this there would be less screen-door-effect and depending on the shape or size of the screen, it may not sacrifice any fov.

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That’s a minor change, which probably wouldn’t make a visible difference (but would reduce the pixel edges slightly). It might make a more noticable difference on the 5K though. Also, depending on how the IPD adjustment works, Pimax might never be able to use the entire screen.

Ehhh If I recall correctly they were utilizing like 80 or 90% of the screen so maybe it would.

On the V2 you would not notice the SDE unless you searched for it by looking closely - but if you did, you would see fine lines. So yes, it is still there, but I would expect you to no longer consider it annoying in most scenario’s. And that’s what we are concerned about, right. It is a substantial improvement over the SDE’s of Rift & Vive. I have not yet tried the Vive Pro nor the Samsung, so I cannot compare it to those.

The big test for me will be the place I felt the sde and resolution of set was worst for me , which was project cars looking down the track at distant objects.

Cool idea for foveated rendering in race sims, the 8KX with super resolution in the area down the track and the rest in less res.

IMO, with my lenovo explorer, MSSA high and SS from 1.3 to 1.6, SDE isn’t that bad on Project cars. The two things needed are : bigger fov to see all the mirrors and have a better speed feeling, and higher resolution to be able to read everything on the dashboard.

For that specific purpose you might not get all you wish for. This is not only due to SDE, which you can expect to be significantly reduced, but due to the resolution too. And while that is improved over the Rift & Vive, it has not improved that much taking into account that we get an upscaled picture. Most of the additional GPU-rendered pixels of the 8K as opposed to Rift & Vive are spent on the extra FoV, i.e. the ppi of the center area where the next bend or race car is being shown has not changed that much after all.
Will it be better than the Rift or Vive ? Sure. Will you feel fully satisfied - I guess no, you will be left for wanting more.

This indeed would better be tackled in a device with the Varjo ultra-high ppi screen blending into the center area of where you are looking, together with eye-tracking. It may take a couple of years to get that working properly in an affordable, mass prodcued and sturdy VR HMD.

I can only speak from vive use. i found project cars horrifying. having to keep attention on distance really made the pixel grid apparent , and i found distance distractedly difficult to read visually. I know pimax wont be free of this but i think, but i think it will be where the resolution of the 8k makes its biggest difference.

I raced in Project Cars with my Pimax 4K, SDE will probably be comparable with the 8K and I didn’t have a real big problem with distance. Ofcourse your eyes will want to focus in the distance which is not possible with current headsets that have a focus field at around 2 meters, so that will stay.

For a game like Project Cars, the 8KX would be the best choice, assuming you have a sufficiently powerful system to run it. That would give you the best distance vision. Driving games, in particular would benefit from fixed foveated rendering, so that the center of the screen has a high level of super-sampling, while the margins are rendered more coarsely.

That’s not really true. With SDE you’re seeing the gaps between subpixels, and while it’s true most of the OLED displays out use a pentile arrangement, which has fewer subpixels, and therefore more SDE, that’s not true of all OLED displays. The PSVR for example is OLED but uses an RGB layout and has comparable SDE to the Pimax 8K from what I’ve seen. There are also variations in the size of the subpixels so some screens can have better SDE than others just based on the fill factor even if they have the same number of pixels and/or subpixels.

The Psvr headset uses a diffusion filter to reduce screen door effect. It bleeds some of the light from pixels to fill in the gaps.