Received my blue case Artisan yesterday and spent about 10 hours checking it out (quite a bit of that time has been spent re-booting my system though!!).
I’m comparing it directly to my OG wireless vive which has all the foam removed apart from a small section on the top so it fits very close to my face.
Colours: I found the colours of the Artisan almost perfectly fine (including the black). I say almost because white ares could sometimes be completely blown out - I tried varying the contrast and brightness which helped a bit (by reducing the contrast to -4 or something) but firstly it didn’t solve it completely and secondly made everything look low contrast. I’m surprised that I haven’t heard this complaint before.
SDE: nice improvement on the Vive
Resolution: overall, although less SDE, I haven’t found much improvement over the VIVE in resolution in terms of what you can read to be honest. Using the RealOVirtual test (the paid for newer version) I could read basically the same level of sized text on the text charts with both headsets set to what I considered their sweet spots in terms of supper sampling etc. Incidentally I found that to be about 100% steam SS and between 1.25 and 1.5 on Pitool - and about 150% Steam SS with the Vive (using a 1080 Ti).
FOV and distortion: First of all Horizontal FOV came out at 120 (using the RealOVirtual test) which I was a bit disappointed by. I’d like to understand whether this has been changed on the new blue case version from 140 on the black case versions. It also had what I would say was very strong distortion in the last 5 or so degrees on each side as well to the point that if I wasn’t wearing glasses where the frames sort of blur this out it would be a very bad thing for me. I have a low glasses prescription so I can either wear them or not and actually generally chose not to bother with my VIVE but I would always have to wear them with this Pimax to cover this distortion. I’m surprised about it as so many people have said they can’t see it and especially given that the Artisan has such a small relative FOV. Now my conspiracy theory is that maybe there is quite a bit of manufacturing variation and the Artisans are getting the worst lenses. Anyways, given only 120 degrees of fov of which the outside is useless anyway this Artisan gives me no significant FOV advantages over my tightly fitting OG VIVE (which using the same test gives me 104 degrees of horizontal FOV!!! Can’t believe that’s the case but it is.
Comfort: I find it very comfortable apart from the wire wrapping around me!!
Overall, I’m not sure if I’m going to keep it. Probably more than half of the things I do in VR involve turning around so the lose of wireless is a big lose to me. I need to test it out more on driving games as although I don’t play them that often I do enjoy them so if the lower SDE helps with these a lot then it might be worth keeping.
I might edit this as I keep testing.
First edit: I forgot to mention that I could only run it at 120 refresh rates, both 90 and 70 rendered the headset a doorstop which took a number re-boots and software reinstallations to bring back to life each time (using Ptool version .255)
yes, 120 Hz - I presume you are not surprised because of the other post showing how the FOV varied by Hz? As i mentioned, I couldn’t change mine without it killing the headset (it just wouldn’t connect when I tried to change it.
My message and your edit crossed over! - It won’t let me change it to 70 or 90 at the moment.
Great review! Pretty close to my experience of the Artisan. Although comparing the colors to the index, they felt as quite a step down (and the index in its turn is already quite a step down from oled)
Yeah also really wondering about the 120 FoV horizontally while they advertise 140 on their website
I’ve just tried to raise a ticket with Pimax and they are asking me for an Order Number but I bought it off Aliexpress (recommend by Pimax because they didn’t have any in stock) so don’t have one!! Too tired to work out what do at the moment!
Yeah exactly the same. The distortion is only at the edges of the Artisan. If you play a game like Beat Saber, where things only happen in front of you and you never have to move your pupils to look through the edges, you will have no distortion at all. But once you look through the edges, it’s quite visible.
I think colours can be the must subjective. The colours were slightly less saturated but only slightly and i personally thought that was better and compensated for them being slightly dimmer (which I forgot to mention in my review) - but I’m one of those guys that likes to have the high saturation mode turned off on my phone!!
Yup, it’s strange though as for me it was really bad - like the image was suddenly coming through the bottom of a milk bottle almost giving the impression of a different image moving independently around the perimeter. I found without wearing my glasses and coving the distortion with their frames it was just too distracting on any game (although I didn’t try Beat Saber). It really makes me think there must a lot of variability in the lenses.
Edit: after another day of playing with this, although there is what I would call significant distortion, the above comment was harsh. Looking at what’s going on it seems to me that the distortion is most prominent when there is a lot of colour and geometry variation in the perimeters (obvious really I guess) and this is when it looks really bad to me. I think the last few games I played on day 1 of my testing must have been like this.
Hmm for me it was not THAT bad. But more like the usual ‘bending’, and ‘compression’ of objects around the edges. But yeah pretty distracting in most games. It was the main reason I sold mine and stayed with the Index. Although the 120 horizontal FoV felt really like a nice step-up from the Index. If they could improve the colors a bit and fix the distortion, I’d prefer it over the index, especially if it comes with the DMAS.
I think the reason I didn’t think it was a step up in terms of FOV is simply because I had to hide the extra FOV with my glasses because of the distortion.