Is it worth it?

Please answer honestly!

There are many guides on the forum how to increase resolution and framerate to get a better picture quality.

On the other hand there are many people who reported a blurred image, ghosting and problems with IPD.

To summarize: while using all these guides, is the overall picture quality (include resolution, ghosting, blurred image and so on) of the Pimax noticeable better than the overall picture quality of oculus cv1 and vive (cv1 and vive have by far to much screen door effect in my opinion)?

Do you think the Pimax is worth it for:

  1. Videos
  2. Games
  3. Both
  4. None
    ?

Do you think the price performance ratio of the Pimax is better than the price performance ratio of cv1 or vive?

I am planning to buy a Pimax so I’m asking all these questions, thanks for an answer!

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My personal experience is the FOV is not great at all even after trying all the suggestions it’s still quite narrow. The colors are very dull and washed out/muted. Ghosting and blurring haven’t been an issue, the image is pretty crisp and I would consider it to be 1080p but definitely NOT 4k or anywhere close. I am returning mine due to it being damaged however so I am probably not the best advisor on this headset.

Personally for me, I am very happy with it.
I like to play around and fairly technical. There has been a lot of problem solving.
But considering its half the price of the oculus, and the results have got (with a lot of playing around) I have a clear image. Sharp and crisp. Color could be brighter.
If you don’t like to play around and curse and swear at dodgy software not for you.
Also I have a perfectly working pimax. That I got at a resonabpe price.

I only have the Primax and Samsung S4 & S7 setups, so can’t compare the CV1 or Vive.

Firstly, you need to get passed the advertising. This product is not being advertised correctly, it is somewhat misleading, and if you purchase expecting to get exactly that, you will be disappointed (this is already well documented in this forum etc. etc.…).

Primax are working hard to fix these issues we are told, but as yet have not published a road map for the product which provides any confidence as to when future updates will be released, what fixes will be included, or what development is planned in the future, or at least I haven’t seen it (which says to me they may have rushed a product to market to be first, and are now fire-fighting development), so you need to ask yourself, do I believe it will get fixed (personally I do, over what timescale, no idea).

I will say to the Primax – guys – if you are starting to roll out to local agents in countries like the UK and US, you need to fix this advertising, not sure how it works in Asia, but here in the UK if your product doesn’t deliver to the advertised spec your company is going to end up in trouble with certain regulatory bodies and you will have to fully refund people (something GearBest are struggling, as they expect returns to have a demonstrable fault).

The resolution of the display is very good, screen door is mostly gone, especially when you appreciate the input signal is 1080 and it’s being up scaled to 4k. Yes at times I’ve seen some blur and ghosting, but I personally think much of this is due to the upscaling, and when higher native resolutions and fps are available this should get better. As for the various resolution changing mods discussed, forcing 2k in extending mode works if you can get through the Chinese app, but this is only useful for extend mode apps not Primax or Direct (unless I missed something?). All the other resolution mods work, but appreciate they are just methods to render / upscale the image; they do not change the native input signal.

I have not had any issues with focus / IPD, but then that’s probably just luck given the automatic adjustment doesn’t work yet. FOV I would suggest is as advertised and on par with other devices, but 110 degrees is not enough to feel a decent level of immersion, it does feel like you’re looking through binoculars sometimes, but this is part of being on the bleeding edge of technology, if there was a 180 degree model out there you’d buy that, there isn’t.

The screen colours and brightness cannot be described as vivid, but they are acceptable to me, I would put them on-par with using a Samsung S4 (1080) in a cheap headset (Homido etc.). In ‘normal’ mode the screen is a little darker than I would prefer, and in ‘cool’ mode the brightness is good but the colours are a little washed out. In either mode once you’ve been using it for 10 minutes you kind of get used to it (well I do).

360 video using SteamVR and the Simple Player works very well when you enable all the super sampling etc. (see other forum posts). The sharpness and resolution far exceed my Samsung S7 setup, things that are close to the screen look very real, but the effect is dramatically decreased the further things are away, again probably due to current 1080 upscaling.

Elite dangerous, whilst playable in VR it’s not the best experience, that’s not all a Primax issue, it’s just the FOV to really appreciate this in VR needs to be much bigger, you tend to only look around because you feel ‘you should be’, not because something caught your periphery vision and you wanted to turn and look, as such, much of the game is played looking forward, hence you’re probably better playing on a 4k monitor IMO. Generally, the same problem as with the 360 video here, in that the inside of the spaceship is very good, you can read all the text looks very real, but things in the distance are blurry / fussy.

So, is it worth it, I’m not going to answer that for you, but would say if you only want it to run Video then you can’t go far wrong, asking price vs your need to watch videos et. But, if you want it for games I would wait for the next firmware release to see what happens, you really need the higher native resolution and frame rate to make games play well.

Which will bring us to the next problem… when/if we do get it running as it should, very few of us are going to have horse power to drive it at 4k60, and probably end up running it lower resolutions anyway, lol, but at least we would have got what we all paid for!

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Thanks for the review, it helps a lot.

To be honest I looked at the vr games which are released and they are all realy boring and to expansive in my opinion, only game which I’m a little bit interested in is Elite dangerous but in the end it is also just a boring space shooter with no much depth.

So I would use the pimax only for video and normal games morphed into vr (gta5 for example).

How well is the expirience with morphed games on the pimax in ur opinion?

I can’t say I’ve tried 2d games in extended SBS mode, will give it a go over the weekend.
Should be able to use the force 2k mod, but would guess it’s still going to come down to compromising on a lower resolution and frame rate (compared to a monitor) just to make it 3D.
Perhaps someone who is already doing this can advise?

…apologies for my Primark / Primax Freudian slip; it’s certainly not that cheap! 

Videos - Amazing
Games - Image is very clean (ofc depends on games) , When you move head left right/ up down, u will see blur a little, maybe cuz refresh rate idk.

But, without position tracking and controlers, i would not suggest buying this for gaming.
If you want to buy it, you can order Leap Motion its very cheaply and it will give you pass for playing a lot more games than you can play without it.

I have now Oculus CV1 and Pimax P1. My opinion - for true VR Oculus CV1 way better than Pimax (true black oled, no ghosting, positional tracking). But for 3D movies witn cinema effect Pimax way better than Oculus. God Rays and SDE in CV1 - its bad for movies.
I recommended Pix.exe path (for actiavte 2560x1440). Best apps for movies:

  • Simple VR Player for Pimax Mode (download free in Piplay)
  • LiveViewRift in Extended Mode (in extended mode you can adjust the brightness, saturation, contrast over Nvidia Panel).
    I also trying many old demo and oculus games for runtime 0.4…0.6 in Pimax (UE Rollercoaster, Helix and more). Its looks great.

I don’t like advertising policy Pimax. They lie. Especially about the autoadjust focus. I have no problems with focus, I see it all clearly, and I did not change IPD(63 mm). I just measure the focal point with my DLSR camera. Pimax lenses has equivalent focus distance 0.52 meters, while the Oculus about 2.5 meters. No any autoadjust, your eyes has autofocus system (from 15cm to infinity). I not have myopia and 0.52 m for me not problem, but 2.5 m its better.

And one more. I think Pimax will better for emulaiton games over VORPX. And Pimax have extended mode and you may use Tridef 3D, Reshade and other.

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For me it is.
It’s the cheapest solution when you play racing games and afak when i compare to youtube’s video you can achieve a better view than with the oculus cv1.

I will make a video thru lens soon with Pcars.
I have gyro issue from times to times, but when it works i enjoy it a lot and i dream to be able to get it working in 2K.
It would be for sure fantastic with racing games.

You have to be careful during the installation and stay away from the oculus rift software.
Within a few days you will find how to start it without issue (at the first try).
Keep your computer clean.

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