So he wrote this review without even trying a single game on it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pimax/comments/9w68h4/pimax_8k_vr_dev_review/e9i32y3/
I havenāt tested any games, nor own Beat Saber
I think he is focusing more on the technical side of it rather than what an average normal user would experience from it.
Well from what Iāve read it seems most users agree that the wide FoV mode (170 horizontally) has too much distortion to be a useful mode. Some seem to differ and I did see some reports from people who actually preferred the wide FoV mode. However his report seems to be what the most report.
He also says:
āNormal FOV nearly get rid of the edge distortion, enough to make it usable, Small totally get rid of that issue, but it feel a little too much restricted, better than a Rift/Vive, but feels like a waste, using your racing car to go food shoppingā¦ā
So thatās again what most seem to report, in normal FoV mode the distortion is almost gone and itās completely gone in small mode.
And I think heās spot on that for the āwideā Fov mode to be a success, youād need eye tracking, like in the star VR, so dynamic distortion correction can take place to fix the issue. Maybe if Pimax releases the eye tracking module that things will get better?
Ive read it all.
Total BS review.
Not tried games, wrong GPU, look who he is friends with etc etc
Wouldnāt waste your time on it.
Thats a bold statement to make. He highlighted some serious issues
I read it.
Interesting perspective from a dev point of view.
I would not call it a bs review, but a review from a different perspective.
Uber technical is right. But in respect his review is considerably worst than RoV & TH.
He evidently doesnāt follow the Forum as we have the Pitool pinned & linked in the banner directory links.
Granted using tools like he is doesnāt allow you to just appreciate anything as your tools are more for measuring flaws & capabilities.
I havenāt had an issue with pitool 84 or 90 by just leaving Render on 1.0x.
But as said Enthusiast often means tweaking some settings.
Considering @Fresco had great results on his 980ti adds contrast opposed to this review. 
Simply a overly technical review & more often folks reacting poorly.
The latter comes from the former.
(EDIT: Oh, and Oliver is a prolific āveteranā of this young era of VR ā I hold his judgement in high regard.)
Am i the only one reading this review positively? I think Iām going to be happy with my pimax from his conclusions.
Current tech pushed to itās limitsā¦
Vive/ rift on steroids.
Sounds good & exactly what I expected.
I never expected pimax to be better in every way & to bring us true future tech.
Just to try their best to improve current tech as much as possible in certain areas.
Fov & resolution were most important to me, & it seemed oculus & htc werenāt prepared to entertain us on that one.
If theyāve improved that & roughly matched everything else, Iāll be a happy man.
Itās better then having to deal with whatās currently available to tide us over for a year or 2,
until a new, better way of doing it comes along.
Ok so let me clarify why this is a BS reviewā¦
This isnāt a review this is a case of āguys please just look at the flawsā¦ and forget that the brain is a flaw-correcting machineā¦please donāt call this gen2ā¦ wait for what Oculus are providing and letās call that gen2 insteadā
Forget his convenient TLDR but itās not the TLDR.
The TLDR as far as Iām concerned is this:
-Friend of Oculus and Palmer
-Weirdly decides to use woefully inadequate GPU
-Doesnāt actually properly try games and see what itās like in practice after playing around (AND ALLOWING THE CRUCIAL PROCESS OF FLAW CORRECTION BY THE BRAIN) but instead focuses on technical observations looking for trouble in detailā¦ The sort of thing some here are calling useful but in truth is no more useful than the flaws we see in gen1 because in practice the brain ignores those things and we just end up caring about EXPERIENCE.
-Very strangely decides to start changing goalposts of what true gen2 should be, pretty much quoting Heaney et al talking about 140FOV, foveated rendering, what the consumer experience on a 970 (wtf???) should be etcā¦ Conveniently setting us up to wait for GDC2019
-bangs on about how he wants/wanted this to succeed to make this seem anything other than the biased non-review it actually is
FFS. If you want to do an unbiased review and make bold statements like āfailureā at least have the decency to get a fucking proper computer, a proper GPU that most would use with this gen2 product (like most were expected to use for gen1), look past obvious teething issues (like early software, poor strap etc) that will obviously be sorted and just PLAY the damned thing like you do with a gen1 product and tell us after at least a week of constant PLAYING (not eyeballing around) what your EXPERIENCE is between gen1 and gen2.
I can spend just a few mins and I can pick out all the technical flaws of the Rift and Vive Pro. The absolutely horrific edge blurring on any Vive, the ridiculously bad FOV of Rift/Vive, teh even poorer FOV of Rift, the terrible godrays of Rift, the bizarre warping of the image throughout the FOV of the Rift, the awful sweet spot and barrel distortions, poor tracking of the Riftā¦ I could have spent even longer listing out all the teething problems of the initial Vive before they were rapidly patched and before DAS came outā¦ or before Touch controllers came out. BUT the fact is despite the technical flaws of these systems they were (and still are) great. Put them on, load up your game, and within minutes you are immersed in some virtual world where you suspend disbelief and giggle with delight at what youāre experiencing. All flaws evaporate so you can have a good experience.
And thank God this small group of Chinese geniuses realised that the one thing that will affect EXPERIENCE more than anything else- more than SDE, warping/blurring, resolution etc is quite simply FOV i.e. how big that world actually is. Ieā¦ How much of your cerebral cortex does your brain have to readjust and ignoreā¦ and how much can it use, like it would in real-life. With gen 1 we were looking at 95-100degrees. (And arguably with Vive about less with the edges being so horribly blurred). With Pimax this figure is a glorious 120FOV at WORST, 170FOV at best and in practice according to most reviewers a lovely 150 degrees FOV if you really want to get rid of distortion. And every reviewer who actually tries games and goes by the experience rather than this piece of BS comments what a phenomenal difference this makes to the EXPERIENCE. Gen 2 experience v gen 1 experience. And of fucking course for gen 2 anything you need gen 2 hardware to run it!!!
So I donāt care about hours of studying every pixel and every bit of distortion. I care for a like for like comparison in EXPERIENCE when you immerse yourself in a game and let your brain ignore technical flaws (as it does very effectively in gen1 devices).
Furthermore all this talk about a consumer device having to be fit for a 970 is the biggest piece of wank Iāve ever fucking read. VR by its nature is cutting edge stuff. Even for gen1 if you donāt have a top of the range PC with at least a 1070 equivalent and lots of room youāre wasting your time or just having a small taster. For gen 2 thereās little fucking surprise 1080Ti or 2080 should be a minimum and by the time Pimax fully rolls out the cutting edge enthusiasts will have this, along with 9900K or Zen2 etc etc. I REPEAT: gen 2 experiences obviously demand gen2 hardware.
Pimax will have its initial teething problems just like Vive and Rift did, and it will have its flaws just like Vive and Rift do, but by all genuine accounts once you get get immersed in a game the difference is night and day, and can be best summed up by MRTVās journalist friend who played a game in a Pimax then went back to the Vive Pro and pissed himself laughing at how comical the experience is. Even this biased review acknowledges this.
Make no mistake. If Vive/Rift with all their flaws etc is acceptable as gen1 VR then Pimax is definitely gen2.
Having said that I am no Pimax fanboy and I do actually like and respect the big boys. Iād be more than happy for (and am looking forward to) HTC, Samsung, Oculus etc raising their game to enhance the gen2 experience wherever they can with the huge resources they have available to them. Iād be disappointed if they donāt. But for now these companies are relevant only as cheap old-gen alternatives for those who havenāt thus far been interested in VR yet, or who havenāt had the resources. So letās please not dare to pretend gen2 isnāt here yet, because it seems like it is.
NOTE I would probably be less damning of this had it not been called a review and had been called simply āa critical technical opinion of some of the flaws by a developerā. In that case yeah sure useful stuff thank you very much. But for it to be regarded as a review in any meaningful sense of the word, and to dare to make ridiculous statements like āfailureā (or any judgement at all!) having the wrong GPU and not having tried any games at all just pissed me off.
The true reviews pretty much unanimously say this thing is great. It has its flaws, it unsurprisingly needs a beefier system, but yeah overall this is a quantum leap in the VR experience and gen 2 is here.
Olivier is a nice chap, I know him from a couple of meetups. And I agree that he is getting lost a bit in his technical view but you have to know that his Synthesis Universe is a project he is working on for many years now, it is near to being released (at least that his what he has been saying - will he ever feel it is the right moment, it is done? Letās see). And this is a highly geometric Tron-like experience with lots of dark or solid darkish color backgrounds, so if a single bright red line on a dark background gets distorted around the edges, or he sees brightness where it otherwise is dark, he will of course notice it stronger than in most games. And he is a dev, so he will be critically looking for flaws of his baby at any edge of the experience.
I would take it for what it is, a review noting a couple of points he found annoying, which will not be as apparent in other experiences or games, and some of the points are a bit weird, I admit, this whole seeing the other screen stuff and so on, havenāt really heard anybody else report that, so take it with a grain of salt.
Funnily, although he focuses almost entirely on some points he doesnāt like, it does seem to say that this headset is still sort of better than what he has experienced otherwise, and the main reason for going back to his Rift is that he is a dev, who needs to focus on what the majority of his future customers will have at home. I donāt read it as if he wanted to say that it is superior or anything like that, just that he needs to stick to a wide-spread standard.
As to his statement around not being next gen: fine, so he is in the camp of the kind of journalists who expect much more from the next gen headset - which we will not see at consumer pricing for another 2-3 years. I donāt care any longer about this kind of label, as it is pointless to discuss it at any greater length as there is no objective truth which position is right and which is wrong. This will be my next headset, so for me personally it is my next gen 
Ok so I trust what you say about him being a nice chap as Iāve seen enough of your posts to respect your opinion.
ā As such, dear Olivier, I apologise if anything sounds personally negative. If youāre a nice chap thatās cool, because I like nice people and I donāt want nice people to feel hurt. ā
Having said that, I reiterate that my issue is merely that this is touted as some sort of review, because itās not. Itās someoneās overly in-depth (albeit useful and interesting) analysis. The final straw for me is the bold assertion in the āreviewā that Pimax is a āfailureā. Had this been a useful article concluding with āso these are my technical observations which some of you may find useful but in truth in the grand scheme of things if you have the right hardware and start playing games on this itās probably a resounding success and a major step up from gen1ā then Iād have liked it.
As you say he is āgetting lost a bitā. He is then making outrageous conclusions as a result. I canāt accept that.
Like @Axacuatl has said. Next gen is just a label.
There is no real standard on what next gen is. Just opinions on what it should be.
One manās next gen, is another manās disappointment.
In this respect, the word next gen is meaningless to me.
I kind of respect all these reviews good or bad, as long as its not hate or bitterness for the sake of it.
I look to see if the person writing them has my thinking & needs.
This guy doesnāt but I donāt need or expect the pimax headset to be what he does.
I want to enjoy games & simply improve on fov & resolution for now.
Those things might take a back seat to other things, for other people.
The trouble is always on seeing negatives allowing them to mute any positives.
On maybe the actual bad is that it maybe difficult atm to use for developer.
Indeed Palmer supports pimax"s efforts. If I recall correctly he was one of the first to identify heās a dev of said program & was interested in being part of the Beta testing.
Like the other reviews that were blown up needlessly. Exactly as @Virtualmisterl has said. Look at the key positives. Being strongly technical one should expect a critical review vs as he said āimpressionsā. Itās not meant to be a bubblegum review.
ouch this hurts,i hope its better then he saysā¦
Very true. As long as we are aware of this & can recognise it, i dont mind.
Itās just human nature.
We have lots of reviews to go through, so most people will be able to make informed decisions for their needs, from all the reviews
Well maybe itās because Iām a techie myself but I really appreciate his review, if only for the new insights Iāve not read about before. Thus far I understood from previous reviews that the āeffectā on the edges was simply distortion. But he describes it to be caused by a combo of blurry lens edges + chromatic aberration + big light accumulation + distortion. Which makes sense and implies that this canāt be solved by eye tracking.
He then also puts out another weakness I havenāt read about, being able to see the left panel with your right eye. Interesting, not sure why I havenāt read about this before though. Maybe he has a very low IPD?
Other than that he also stresses some strong points, like that the lens, except for the edges, is free of blur, colours are āgood enoughā, and that itās hard to go back to previous gen because of the tunnel vision.
All-in-all the review doesnāt really change what Iām expecting and again, seems in line with quite a few other reviews. I mean we already knew that most users wonāt run this HMD at āwideā Fov because of the issueās he (and others) pointed out. Nothing new there.
Yeah, heās critical of flaws, but his analogies are that the Pimax are a racing car vs ordinary car? Current gen but on steroids? Fan-friggin-tastic that is.
One thing few reviewers explicitly mention is the answer to this question. After getting and trying the Pimax for a week, with all itās picky negatives, basically beta software, edge aberrations, what will be your headset of choice going forward? I think other than that super negative Spain review, basically all of the people thus far are saying āPimax winsā and theyāll be using it all the timeā¦ and then pointing out some of itās minor shortcomings.