Hi all,
Got my 8K+ a few days ago, but not had a great deal of time to play with it other than initial setup and a quick trip into Elite Dangerous, so this is without any tweaking and “straight out of the box”. Also my wife will be using this one, as I’m still happy with my 8K and we both exclusively play Elite Dangerous (normally in a wing, but sometimes multi-crew).
Packaging - looks more professional with its magnetic clasps
Headset build/quality - feels heavier than my 8K, but not weighed to be sure. It also feels more robust and I like the “rubberised coating”
Comfort Strap - so I know we’ll be getting the rigid mount at some point, so this won’t be the “normal” customer experience, but the cloth strap is worse than the 8K’s. The top strap is too short to allow the triple joint at the back to sit low enough on the back of your skull, so the HMD tends to droop forward.
Comfort - HMD/Facial Interface - very much improved over the 8K - if you can get the cloth strap holding it right then the new face foam is like wearing a full face crash helmet where it touches. The nose flaps I think I will remove - they’re OK, but are a little intrusive. Oh and glasses fit inside really well (my wife needs them, but I fly without).
Software - I acted like a new customer here, as the 8K+ is going on my Threadripper machine, so installed Steam, then SteamVR then the PiTool off of the web site - v xxx.249 iirc. That was OK and as its using the same lighthouses as the 8K , the setup picked them up and everything came to life much more easily than the 8K experience.
I left settings completely alone apart from disabling Smart Smoothing and enabling Parallel Projections and hopped into Elite Dangerous, which just picked it up instead of the Rift that was on this machine. So that was cool.
Screens/Lenses - improved imho - better colours/blacks (not huge), couldn’t make out any SDE very easily, no ghost rays and the clarity seemed much better. However, with this software version I am seeing a kind of swimming/distortion effect at the edges of each side and it appears I think outside the zone of binocular overlap. Best I can describe it as is like looking like a kind of rippling water effect and it doesn’t always occur, which makes me think its a distortion profile thing in software i.e. fixable.
Tweaking - I will try and tweak the experience by installing different software versions to see if the distortion goes away and also see if I can improve an already improved view compared to my 8K.
Conclusion - unless the distortion is related to my install and is not software, this needs fixing asap before new purchaser’s wonder why the experience isn’t as good as other PiMax 8/5K users have described it in the past (i.e. its currently retrograde). The rigid headstrap can’t come fast enough. I can understand the need to get the products shipped, but this cloth headstrap is worse than the previous 8K version and the general market won’t be as forgiving. Unless the rigid headstrap is more than 2-3 months away, a delay even though its unpopular is probably better than giving some of the “anti-PiMax” crowd further ammunition.
TL:DR - once the rigid headstrap is shipping with the unit and the distortion is patched out I would recommend this product to others. Until then I couldn’t recommend to anyone who isn’t willing to wait for those two improvements (or work around them).
P.S: My wife is very happy however coming from the Rift, with the FoV, clarity and other improvements from the Rift and is now looking at me to improve the strap and tweak the software.
PPS. I’m not going to post this in the Elite Dangerous forums yet, until I’ve had a go at getting rid of the distortions.
