I have stared into the sky and clouds on both and I can say on the 5K+ i really noticed it, on the 8K not much… Maybe people are different, i think you also need an 1 to 1 comparision to be sure… 
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Yes, a 8K and 5K + face-to-face comparison would be ideal. Indeed, all have their own characteristics…
In any case, I am pleased with your positive feedback about 8K 
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@Century The strange thing is that some other guy that sweviver did interview
for sure go for the 5kplus,because he saw the pixels in the 8k somewhat moving(SHIMMERING) and not on the 5k plus with the same game.
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now its even harder to make a choice for me lol…
That’s the point. Opinions are very different, but in my opinion, all the same, most still agree in general that 8K SDE is less noticeable …
And here on the horizon a 5K + clarity emerges, which forces many to choose 5K +, despite the larger SDE. And to someone the diagonal SDE hits in the eyes at 8K …
The choice is getting harder and harder 
But in any case, both headsets are good, we know that. So a bad choice will be difficult to make
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yes i first tried the 8K… and than I took on the 5K+ in my first thoughst were…: Oh! really cool color temperature and noticeable horizontal SDE… (damn…)
I wish it was that easy to prefer that 5K+ as almost everybody…
Maybe become Patreon of Sweviver he has uploaded 5 GB of through the lens screenshots a while ago… Have a deep look at it and maybe you can make your choice…
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I only have a question. Is 5K+ SDE similar to Oculus Go SDE?
Because I love the horizontal Go SDE. I see it, but it doesn’t bother me.
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Yes, I have already reviewed all the original photos through the SweViver lens several times already, he was kind and shared with everyone here in this post:
I can say that I like 8K more in some photos, and in some photos 5K + wins. In general, it is rather difficult to tell about SDE from enlarged macro photos.
And if you compare video clips through a lens from Sweviver, then 8K wins for me everywhere with its colors and softness / smoothness of the image.
And on 5K + sometimes horizontal lines are noticeable.
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Okay, I was at Gouda too, very nice team over there, thanks for setting all of this up, guys, and cool to chat with you !
So, here are my impressions (beware of the wall o’ text):
First of all, I have to say it is an awfully small sample size, sort of the same as with the V2 one year ago at VRDays. They only allowed me to test Assetto Corsa, and later when I sneaked my way into the queue again because I saw they were allowing some Skyrim demos after all, I unfortunately wasn’t allowed to try Skyrim but instead they had switched to Project Cars; which on the 8K had some performance issues and in addition tracking errors, but the latter where said to stem from a malfunctioning lighthouse box they said they knew was causing issues every now and then.
So with this limited setup, which they of course chose to focus on “the decision” (TM LeBron James), it was difficult to get the bigger picture on the headsets as such - the Berlin meetup backers had a better opportunity to get the more complete picture.
Secondly, and I know this won’t be news to you, always remember that the perception per individual can vary wildly. You will notice that with a few of my comments too. This means my findings may be confirmed by you , but chance is that you will have a very different impression when you try the same headset. Seems we are all quite individually different, good news in general I guess, but making it difficult to rely on such reviews for certainty on your own views. And for the good order, I haven’t had my IPD measured yet and only roughly remembered the Rift IPD I use (63,5 - 64), and I did not spend too much time to try to find the best IPD setting as it wasn’t awful as I set it.
Let’s get started:
The FoV (normal mode) is great, of course. Let’s just be clear on that. However, same as with the even larger FoV Pimax likely demoed one year ago with the V2, I still notice the boundaries both vertically and horizontally, in the sense that I notice a dark rim at the outside of my vision. So for me it doesn’t change the view from binoculars to natural unrestricted view, but from binocular to a nice, large view: some people in older threads coined the comparison between binoculars and a scuba/skiing mask. But it is surely more than enough having in mind that you would take away the resolution from the central area to feed such peripheral areas.
SDE: actually, I have to say it is quite noticeable. I checked the sky in Assetto Corsa with both headsets, and although the structure is different as you know, I personally found both to be equally visible. The pixels are really small, the SDE really isn’t bad at all, but I did not have to focus much on it, I would notice it when looking at the sky - it was just right there, no searching required. For me there was no real difference between the two headsets in terms of which one is less intrusive, to be honest. I could flip a coin.
The funny thing is, I spoke to another user who actually said he looked for the SDE and could hardly see any, even when he tried hard.
Let me make this one worse by adding that I tried Skyrim on the Rift, which they had setup there too - and when looking at the sky in Skyrim, different game of course, I actually felt that the Rift SDE isn’t THAT bad after all, when compared to what I just on the Pimaxes before. I know, this is weird shit. I could not do a direct side by side comparison, which makes it a bit tricky to compare the impressions. And perhaps I had an off day, I was a bit tired in general, but I cannot make too much sense out of this - but I saw what I saw so that’s that.
So do I see pixels - yes. Do I see SDE - yes. Is it annoying - no, not really but it’s surely not entirely gone, and for watching movies etc. it still will be noticed by me, especially if there is not so much going on in the scene and I start to have time to turn my attention to that kind of detail more. I haven’t tried the O+ yet, so cannot say how that would compare.
On the Project Cars demo I thought that the 5K+ SDE was slightly more obvious than the 8K one, because I noticed a bit of a horizontal lining (but not a vertical one) - I had not seen that within Assetto Corsa, could be game specific. I did not check carfefully because I had not intended to try (a laggy) PJC but Skyrim at that point so I wasn’t overly focussed.
Colors/black: on the colors I did not really notice much difference, but I clearly seem to be less sensitive to this point. The black levels of the 5K+ in the two games were fully acceptable to me - the 8K seemed to be a bit deeper but for me that would not be a big issue. I would have loved to try Elite but alas, it wasn’t on the menu.
Sweetspot: as expected much better than with the current gen headsets. I did notice that you have a nice big sized sweetspot with absolute clarity around the middle-section of your FoV, and then there comes a larger area of just oh so slightly blurry view (but substantially (!) less than the Rift/Vive blur outside focus) and then of course at the end you get the distortions. This second segment surely is attributable to the flat part of the fried egg design lenses.
Distortions: yes, if you look for them you’ll find them. But when I looked around as I would when playing a game, I did not even notice them if I tried to concentrate of the area outside the fovea. Only if I would really take my eye to one side quite far, I would start to notice it, but it didn’t bother me. The only thing was, there was a kind of a pole of the car - that one seemed to end in the air, with background seemingly being shown for the last centimeter of the pole where it leaves your screen. If I were a racer who keeps his head very straight and turns the eyeballs a lot to the outside when a car is pulling up next to them, then he perhaps might notice this as annoying. But then again, how many glitches of trees popping up out of nowhere etc. do you see in games and I don’t think I would have a real issue with this one. I did not notice any other distortions, so nothing near the inside of the lense towards the nose (did not specifically search for it as I forgot about it, but certainly did not notice it unpleasently either).
Details: I admit I did not really notice the alleged greater detail of the 5K+, I would say it probably was a wee bit sharper but not a great deal. Checking out the pictures in the forum on the DCS (?) gauges it would seem to be a world of difference. But this was difficult because you could not go back and forth with the two headsets and have the exact same frozen scene visible.
Comfort: I did not have any issues, but I did not wear them for any extended period of time so there you go.
My conclusion was that I could not really see any spectacular difference between the two headsets in the rather limited circumstances (hence it is not entirely conclusive for me). It just means that the 5K+ still has the edge as it seems to get along with less GPU power, meaning I can play PJC2, Elite and Fallout 4 (?) at better settings for decent performance, which makes it a winner. I’ll take the slightly weaker blacks and possibly more pronounced SDE as I don’t expect these to be noticed by me once I use the headset on a daily basis.
I believe the headset is a nice bump over what I am using currently, but it is not the end of the road, there’s still a lot to be improved in the coming generations. Again, no surprise and this takes nothing away from the two headsets, because I view them as a great upgrade over the current gen (haven’t tried the O+ and the Vive Pro only very briefly a couple of months ago but the FoV advantage would seem obvious).
The only real surprise for me was that the SDE was still present more than I had anticipated. I would have loved to check that out in Elite Dangerous where the missing detail and resulting jagged orbital lines annoy me rather frequently on the Rift - usually I don’t check out skies extensively during the game…
ALl in all I remain very keen on getting my Pimax some day, whenever that may be. I’ll just not expect them to be a wet dream come true - they are really good, just not that good.
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So you like 8K more because of better colors and less SDE ?
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I also prefer the horizontal-vertical SDE of Oculus GO against the diagonal SDE of Oculus Rift.
But if the diagonal SDE of 8K is less visible that on 5K+, then I don’t know what to choose, unless see it with my own eyes. @anon74848233 Btw, still no date announced for the London meetup ?
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For me it was both together, but remember I had very little time to Check out both…
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Nice to meet you yesterday @Axacuatl.
I tried Skyrimm on the Rift before testing the pimax. I also noticed the SDE wasn’t much different between the 5k+ and the Rift but the sharpness when looking further away was bad for me in the Rift and good for me with the 5k+ and the 8k.
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I was at VRspace also and completly agree with you,
Now my experience is very much in favor of the 8K, while the larger group prefer the 5k+ for the know reasons… I had also decided to go for the 5K+ before this experience.
The 5k+ i was not so impressed. It was brighter in project cars but find the colors were washed out, and everything looked blocky to me. It felt like an first gen headset as my lenovo explorer.
The 8k felt like second gen to me, the colors where better, the screendoor was very fine and hardly noticable and the world in project cars feld natural . I could easely read the cockpit meters, although the image is slightly softer but not blurry at all. I havent tried the o+ but i can imagine it is very comparible
The 8k was a more polished experience for me.
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I also went to the VRspace event on saturday driving 2 hours from the next country but I couldn’t help but leaving feeling dissapointed. Just for the record I’m glad this was organised and as such I had great hopes up in order for me to properly analyze and compare all common aspects for both headsets. I noticed that with the timeslots organization etc the whole event was set up really professionally on all aspects except for…the pimax core demo itself !
I would have been very happy with a demo scene of skyrim VR which shows lines of text or any static visuals that allow for proper comparison on both headsets but a racing VR sim with low textures on the sides ? Seriously ?? Project cars to me really felt like the ‘wrong’ content for this demo. In addition the machines powering the headsets simply didn’t have the juice to properly feed these demanding headsets so stuttering and over-reprojection made my friend and myself carsick within minutes. We couldn’t even finish our timeslot of 15minutes with it. I stopped the cars eventually to check the bystanding people on the side but it wasn’t enough to properly assess the headsets so I basically felt no wiser upon leaving The fact is that (wider FOV aside) my vivepro at home simply looks alot better and more fluid than the project cars in this particular demo which means the event missed the ball somewhere leaving me most likely with the wrong impressions of the headset’s potential. I deeply feel if I were to organize/optimize and QA the hardware/software demo setup myself the experience would have been a complete different one for not only myself but everyone testing these 2 headsets.
In defense of VRspace though I heard afterwards something technically went wrong right before the start and as such skyrim VR was removed from the demo last-minute as well as settings had to be reconfigured during the event itself in order to achieve reasonable fps (and I fear that part failed as well). So it might have been simply bad luck on their part. Still I want thank them for the opportunity and organizing this event even though it turned out pretty pointless for me. They clearly really tried to set up the event in an organized and professional way despite the core part of the demo ending up ‘failing’ somehow.
Perhaps this might be redone in the future with an optimized set up. If not, at least this information hopefully makes the next event better so that others might get the ‘right’ experience from the start.
tip: for any next such demo event I suggest to have an experienced person with troubleshooting skills like Sweviver come 1 day up front and fully test and proof and QA for the whole setup the day before the event starts including latest optimized hardware in order to ensure that the final experience is ‘the way it’s meant to be experienced’ 
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Yeah I sometimes wonder if I made the right choice for my 5k+. It’s like you said, ‘blocky’. Never tried the 8k but I can’t help to think that this actually might be the better HMD.
I had planned to quickly switch to StarVR anyway but now it seems that this might not happen anytime soon (if at all) due to the problems with their company … Too bad.
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I watched all the videos from this meet and switched to the 5K+ last minute because most prefer it.
After watching all those vids I came to a much, much more important conclusion though: The two headsets seem to be so much closer to eachother than all thes max zoom images suggest. No matter wich one you choose - you get a good headset.
I went for the 5K+ because of readbility in Elite Dangerous mostly. I also own an oculus go and I prefer the non diagonal type of SDE. I am 100% sure I’d be happy with the 8K as well though.
This is an impossible choice for all of us who can’t see them both but After all the vids I think it doesn’t matter as much as we all think it does.
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What have science done ?!
WE HAVE ACHIEVED BIOMOLECULAR FUSION !
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Yes i understand you, i was thinking about that. i’m afraid many people make the wrong choice now with the 5k+ all hyped up and that’s really a shame. I understand now also why the reviewer in tomshardware review couldn’t fully mark the 5k+ as an next gen headset.
The testers emphasize the things they find important. Instead of giving the strong points on all sides. I don’t really blame them, its human and they just give there opinion wich is there perception and preference. It’s a fault of Pimax, they don’t do anything with product information and left everything to the testers with this result. And now i know for sure there is a group who will buy the wrong headset
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Don’t get me wrong, there is no good or bad headset. you have your perception en preferences. Personally for me it was a big difference between the headsets with the same scenes.
Everybody sees differently so if you didn’t see much difference it’s fine by me.
So I would recommend people if you can go try them yourself I;m so glad i did!
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I only watched the videos of all the people reporting. I have not seen either of the headsets.
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