I suppose what prompted me to say this was what I’ve read on the forums as of late as well as my own interaction with some VR users with existing HMDs.
Only 1 out of the 4 people I spoke with had a high degree of interest towards the Crystal.
The other 3 stated the incompleteness of the product as well as the poor reputation regarding the software side as reasons why they’re not all that interested.
4 people is surely not enough to represent a very accurate pulse on the situation.
However, there’s ‘some’ indication there regarding where PIMAX needs to focus, IMO.
It’s more valuable to have seasoned veterans and existing users of VR comment on the PIMAX Crystal vs. potential users with minimal experience. Simply because the WOW Factor would likely be difficult to resist for the latter and not allow their initial impressions to be jaded.
While we blabber on about topics like this , I’m confident that we all want PIMAX to succeed and bring the best quality HMD to market!
Thus a completely functional HMD with high compatibility and solid software experience is desired.
IMO
Oh. and ‘First To Market’ doesn’t automatically mean success. It’s what is brought to the market that counts.
Yes. There’s timing, but if a product is brought quickly to market, yet is incomplete and or has issues, then it doesn’t matter how good that product’s ‘potential’ is compared to a competing product that comes to market a little bit later. Ultimately Ebay will be flooded with the inferior product and people will move to the better product and carry along with them their negative experiences regarding the first product.
I don’t think any company wants that type of baggage.
Elon Musk had been promising fully autonomous driving for a few years now, but do Tesla cars can really do FSD ? Well, I recommend not to let go of the wheel when you are driving a Tesla.
But that broken promise never stopped people from buying Tesla cars. The customers enjoy their driving for all other ACCOMPLISHED features.
When a company promise you a product with feature A + B, sometimes they can only do A, but bad at B. Well, now you should really ask yourself, what do you think about feature A ? Is it worth the buy ?
As we all know, Pimax already accomplished the feature A with flying colors, literately. They can offer you a high end headset that can achieve the best color and resolution on the market with a fair price. Other products, like Varjo Aero, which only has feature A, can barely compete.
The problem is the feature B, the wireless and untether mode, which might not work properly for another few months.
So now it all comes back to the Tesla analogy. People won’t stop buying Tesla because the FSD is not done. And people won’t stop buying Crystal because the wireless mode is not finished.
Well, maybe some will. It’s your loss. All I need now is feature A. I want to watch Avatar 2 in full 2880x2880 qled glory. Why would I want to watch the movie with wireless, which is prone to interference and interruption?
And I think feature A worth the money they are charging. This feature is already the best in the industry.
Feature B is nice, but I won’t really count on it.
All the simmer out there, ask yourself, “Will you do the sim with tethering or not ?” I think 9 out of 10 will do the sim with tethering, because they already have all the rigs positioned an connected. No one wants to change the battery in the middle of the flight.
Though, if I pay full price for a product, I expect all features to be delivered as advertised, because it’s included in the price.
Now, your point about Tesla is a nice one. However, fully self-autonomous driving was nowhere near what it is and can still be back when the hype came out about it. Yet the car is still a car and there’s a lot more utility to it to make it compelling instead of just missing the fully self-autonomous driving. Something which Tesla doesn’t have a high level of control over.
I think other HMDs like the PICO 4 have already proven the stand-alone mode well enough.
Sure, it doesn’t have some of the strengths that the PIMAX Crystal has, that’s to be sure.
Yet, included in the price and a rather notable feature that’s already proven on the market already is the stand-alone mode which PIMAX is advertising.
Personally, I wouldn’t put my cash into anything where one of the notable features was missing in action without any clear and reliable path to its implementation with a decent degree of maturity.
As I said, people certainly can spend their money however they want to.
I personally feel that throwing money at products without the promised feature-set delivered first is simply sending the wrong message to these companies and bolsters them to more and more adjust the norms where people will put out money even if the product is half complete, because, that’s what everyone else does…
I am not so concered with Feature A, or Feature B, as I am with the base line the whole written-down alphabet rests on…
It appears that upon further questioning, a lot of people coming out of the test booth describe something “feeling off” about their view in the HMD, which rings a whole glockenspiel worth of bells in my ears.
-This it why I went from a p5k to an Index without looking back, even though it was no more than a side-grade resolution-wise, and a severe downgrade when it comes to FOV.
Valve got the basics right – the optics worked, and the projection was life-like; I got a proper, and to-scale sense of room, and clarity in the virtual room volume – something I never could with the p5k.
It is also why my occasional trying my very best to give the p8kX another chance, for a few consecutive days, invariably results in physical discomfort, and a sense of relief returning to the much worse resolution and FOV of the Index.
“Anyone” can brute-force a higher resolution display panel into a device, but setting it up properly takes engineering. Pimax have had many technical “firsts” - way ahead of the field on the calendar, but unfortunately more often than not totally cancelled out by imperfect execution.
…as for shuffling of release dates and new product reveals, (EDIT: …and preordering), and so on… Make mine an Osborne 2.
The crystal is not heavy and its width is shorter than a shoe box that you take as a reference!
I had it on my head at the roadshow in Paris and I never had a headache, forehead, nose during the 5 hours I was at the roadshow.
It is quite different from my old pimax 5k+ and less big on the outside.!!!
Even though the Crystal is about to be shipped without wireless pcvr connection, standalone and eyetracking working there’s still a solid case for it being a good vr headset. Its main rival, the Aero, only has the advantage of eyetracking (and knowing Tobii are involved I think this will work on Crystal eventually). Even in the state the Crystal is in as of today it has bigger fov, higher PPD with the 42 PPD lenses, inside out tracking, bundled controllers, local dimming, qled as well as possibly other things extra when compared to the several $100’s more expensive Aero. I rate Varjo as a company but I know where my money would be going to and it’s not them.
tl;dr even with some missing features the Crystal is still good.
They have the same resolution. So if the FoV is higher on the Crystal, then the (average) PPD will be higher on the Varjo and vice versa. You can’t have both. It’s possible that the Crystal does have a higher PPD in the center but then the sides will be substantially blurrier, so you’d see a clear sweet spot. So I don’t see this as an advantage of the Crystal. The FoV itself of couse IS an advantage.
So if the Crystal has a substantially better FoV, then the Aero will have a substantially better average PPD.
Also disagreed. The varjo has the optics right. Apart from the distortion of course, but they pretty much fixed that to a degree that it’s on par with the 8kX and most seem to not even see it. But Varjo showed that they got the basis right, the optics just work, everything looks good, no ‘Pimax weirdness’, eyes are 100% relaxed, no eye strain whatsoever. This is my biggest issue with Pimax, just like @jojon said above, anyone can throw a higher resolution panel in a headset, that’s not difficult. The difficult part is making a realistic, believable 3D world, with optics that just feel natural. So far Pimax has not shown that they’re even able to do that. So I’m still very skeptical. If they can’t get that right, I’d take the Aero over the Crystal any day.
Says that on the product page. Sounds more like it post processes to emulate HDR than actually being HDR. Funnily enough I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone ask about that marketing point, nor have I heard Pimax ever talk about it.
But yeah, I think it’s fair to say the headset is not HDR. Otherwise they would have mentioned what standard it met.
Ageed. The Crystal is not HDR- as I understand the term. Which consumer HMD do you know of that has High dynamic range? It would have to have an OLED display wouldn’t it? I mean to get to zero nits brightness on a pixel? And working at 4k? I can’t find any that seem to match the requirements for HDR designation. That, along with human eye FOV, resolution and pixel density is sort of the holy grail of VR. Someday we’ll get there. Hopefully in smaller headsets at more buyer friendly price points.
@tykey6 I think it would still be better for pimax to have everything working as quickly as possible. I just re-watched the ‘Finally Launching’ interview that Sebastian did with Pimax USA and Robin, and while the audio was glitchy on my youtube playback, especially for Robin, I thought I heard them say that all the onboard hardware was in place. The holdback is apparently software. Tobii is supposed to be very close, Wireless I don’t know about, nor standalone mode.
I THOUGHT I heard them say that hey had been demoing stand alone mode, but the audio really wasn’t that clear.
If the hardware is ok, and it’s just a matter of fine tuning the software that’s not such a big deal. (Unless you’re AMD and lost at sea trying to build drivers).
Anyhow, I tend to agree that getting everything working that’s supposed to come WITH the headset is a pretty big deal if Pimax wants to continue to build new credibility. So far so good, (like the optimist said as he fell past each floor). I believe Pimax will get it sorted sooner than we fear.
The thing about HDR is that you need the hardware and software to be properly capable of it. There’s a different way in which you render SDR vs HDR content and take full advantage of it.
As you said though, no consumer HMD does HDR and thus the software support for VR on HDR is basically non-existent. After all, why would you bother adding in HDR support when nothing uses it? If you’ve used an HDR monitor before, think of like how a handful of flatscreen games have a calibration process specifically to tune the HDR when it detects you have an HDR display.
I imagine that what Pimax is doing is going to be much like Window 11’s auto HDR feature. It can, to make a TL;DR, take an SDR game and tone map it to be compatible with an HDR display’s featureset, even if it’s not natively supported. How good this is can vary, but it can range from “basically no difference” up to “surprisingly good” on proper HDR displays. I have an HDR1000 display with QLED and have been impressed by the auto HDR feature now and again.
The hardware on the Crystal is at least there to use some features people say are vital to HDR, it has a very wide color gamut and good local dimming, which is something that actually a lot of “HDR” monitors either lack or do quite poorly. Like many things, there are “levels” when it comes to HDR and various factors in it, like local dimming, color gamut, software support, and brightness, but generally, it’s heavily tied to brightness. Though, that said, this is where things get rather nebulous and hard to determine on a VR headset. Because a lot of people will say you need something like HDR1000 to start getting into true and proper HDR brightness, and as somebody who has seen HDR400 vs HDR1000, yeah there’s a difference. HOWEVER, that’s when you’re using the monitor in a brightly lit room. 1000 nits in a bright room compared to a dark one with only the monitor on feels a hell of a lot different. And in VR? You’re not in a regular room, you have your vision completely isolated and blocked off to where even 200+ nits can feel bright as hell, sometimes uncomfortably bright to some. But that’s laughably dim by monitor standards.
HDR standards will probably have to be a bit revised when it comes to virtual reality headsets due to the different environments, but as of right now we don’t have a standard for HDR in VR and I don’t think the standards for monitors can exactly translate 1:1 well with VR display, or well at least certain aspects of it.
PSVR2 is HDR, I believe it’ll be the first one. Meganex also claim to be HDR but I don’t think that will mean much without the software support to deliver HDR content to it. So for now PSVR2 will be the only one I imagine, for some time anyway. Valve’s next headset will probably be the first PCVR headset to really fully implement it (but that’s just pure speculation on my part).
I don’t think anybody would actually consider the claim for HDR to be legitimate anyway. The meta-HDR prototype needed to be plugged into a wall and have a carbon 3-D printed mesh as a heat sink. When you factor in that the HMD has a. XR two and battery pack on board, there simply isn’t enough space to actively cool the kind of backlight you would need for HDR.
Not that the post processing wouldn’t help give an HDR effect. In the first oculus connect conference, John Carmack talked about using interlacing to create a variable persistence display. You would refresh one line at full persistence, and various other lines at varying degrees of persistence. A software developer would tone map accordingly and provide an HDR like affect.
I doubt pimax has implemented anything like that, but it’s not impossible
Meta’s was an entire order of magnitude brighter than even monitors. It was what, 10-20k nits? Even really bright consumer monitors cap out around 1000-1500 nits. Of course it’s gonna take ludicrous power. You don’t need to go ANYWHERE near that high to have an HDR experience that’s better than SDR.
They were trying to push things to the ultimate extreme with real life brightness, which is way beyond just the usual HDR.
When they used them side by side at the roadshows/CES etc everyone said the Crystal has a higher fov than the Aero, the vast majority also said the Crystal is as sharp as the Aero. I don’t know how the Crystal distributes its PPD but it must be different to the Aero so yeah maybe there is more of a sweetspot, i’ve not seen anyone comment about that though.
Setting aside the focal point issue brought up by MRTV because it has since been fixed by different lenses, i didn’t see much negativity about the optics of the Crystal. I think Thrillseeker mentioned “usual Pimax weirdness” (whatever that meant) but there wasn’t much else afaik. There were lots more positive than negative comments about the optics. It’s not something I’m concerned with.
Oh I would too without a doubt. It could be the case that with several other releases of hardware at the moment or impending, like PSVR2 and Vive XR Elite, Pimax felt the need to get Crystal out there asap before the others came to market. That’s just speculation ofc.
Agreed, I’ve read and watched every impression that I could find and the optics and visual quality is the one thing that almost everyone says is excellent (other than the focus issue that you mentioned). In direct comparisons with the Aero it has been said to be just as good or better by almost everyone who tried them. I really don’t think that is going to be an issue. The big unknown is the status of things like eye tracking and wireless functionality.
Long reply to VRGimp’s post, guys; sorry for that, nothing new in here, so you might as well skip it.
Okay, I misunderstood you then.
That’s still a bit of a leap of faith as you don’t really see much, it’s difficult to present the quality of a VR headset’s functions via a video clip other than through the lens videos to get a feel for the picture quality.
A bit of a stretch in my view as you make it sound as if that’s it, no more to it. Sure, the 12K’s panels will fit the housing, but we are talking 140° diagonal on the Crystal and >200° for the 12K. So my guess is that it’s not just as easy as grab the Crystal, stuff in the new panels and voila, show time! And we haven’t even talked lenses here. A question of time it may be, but that may well end up meaning 1-2 years of delay, and still being buggy and partially non-compliant or dis-satisfactory on a couple of specs. But fine, we simply have different approaches and expectations towards a Pimax.
So effectively you are saying people are dumb because they don’t understand that wireless will never really allow for high-quality PC VR anyhow, and thus it doesn’t matter if wireless never works (well). Same goes for stand-alone. So we shouldn’t blame Pimax for selling the product with wireless & stand-alone specs but possibly never matching them properly.
I disagree. First of all, if I buy a product I expect it to meet its specs, as said previously. Full stop.
Besides, I fully expect a resolution as that of the 12K to potentially work very well on a ultra-wide FoV headset by virtue of DFR, and Pimax said that wireless (without such DFR-induced reduction of required bandwidth) will be working with a substantially smaller FoV only anyhow.
On stand-alone, I generally agree with you that I hardly see any added value (other than having a really geeky virtual cinema device with you on a plane, i.e. ultra-wide FoV media player). But again, if they justify the price with such spec I want to see it being functional.
The difference here is, Meta have teased Crystal Cove (pun intended) & co. years ahead of their releases - but without announcing if and even in which year it will ship.
And yes, we are in the era of covid, I noticed: but how does that excuse Pimax’ end of September communication telling us the Crystal will start to ship in China as early as two weeks later, and then in other areas mid of November? What do you believe was supposed to happen development & production-wise in these two and six weeks, respectively, what they weren’t able to recover till January 20, 2023 - all due to covid? Did a nuke wipe out their factory? Don’t think so.
And covid didn’t disrupt their efforts surprisingly on September 29 and otherwise they would have met their shipment announcement of Q3 2022, so why did they wait until the very last day of the previously promised shipping window? The best reason would be in order to be able to make a reliable announcement this time. Didn’t quite work out, did it.
The magic word is - communication. For whatever reason they just have a unfailing knack for shooting themselves in the foot with their announcements when you didn’t even notice they had a gun. Time and again they announce a commercial release date of a product which means people in the Western world understand that to mean a fully functional, final commodity ready for shipment.
If they said, look, we are not a proper commercial company, but a bunch of enthusiasts trying to push the envelope, and you are purchasing a early access hardware product which we will ship in bare state with lots of functionalities missing or broken, and we endeavour to get them working but cannot promise anything, it would be a different story. I wouldn’t consider it a purchase of a commercial product but more like the Kickstarter projects where I expected to see some of the promised features to perhaps not make it exactly as envisaged. It’s a completely different mind-set. But that also means that I would only be willing to invest in 20% of the cases where if it is a product with the specs being effectively promised I would actually go on and buy it. There’s been a bunch of Kickstarter’s I found intruiging but didn’t get onboard due to the risk of them not being able to fulfill their promise (base don experience having a couple of Kickstarter rewards here which didn’t really perform the job as I hoped they would).
Because there isn’t another company making a product B.
The only reason I care about Pimax is because they’re the only company making more powerful and immersive consumer VR gear. If a less janky company offered products in the same class, I would move to them in a heartbeat. Because all I care about is having the best VR gear available.
But as it is, other than Pimax, I think that every other VR headset that was released after the Index is actually inferior to the Index overall. Even a much newer and more expensive VR headset like the Aero is only better than the Index at just one thing, clarity. And then is otherwise inferior in literally every other category. For 4X the price, the thing doesn’t even have audio versus the Index’s still best audio on the market.
The same kinds of crippling deficiencies exist in every other released and announced VR headset. They’ll have one thing that’s better than the Index, and otherwise worse.
The Crystal and 12K are the only upcoming VR headsets that are, at least by their specifications, better or at least equal to the Index in every way. Literally no other company has announced a VR headset that is properly in the same class.
That’s a sorry state of affairs for the VR industry which I believe reflects the damage that Meta’s anticompetitive practices have done. But here we are.
I think the importance of having a finished “full feature set” is being overplayed on these forums. If Pimax had kept unfinished future features a secret like other companies do, there wouldn’t even be this perception. The Crystal compares favorably with other VR headsets on the market even without these other features ready yet.
Further, other VR headsets like the Varjo Aero have initially released with unfinished features, too. Yet Varjo doesn’t get the grief for it that Pimax does on these forums.
The difference is that Varjo puts money into its marketing and has a much better marketing image. This is a perception issue.
For better or worse, Pimax seems to invest its money and resources almost exclusively into its engineering rather than its marketing. It seems to barely have a marketing department to speak of, and it seems like marketing may even just be a part time function of a few of their employees who have other responsibilities. Consequently, Pimax has very little control over its public perception. A significant portion of its poor reputation is a result of its poor messaging rather than actual deficiencies of its product releases.
, I’m confident that we all want PIMAX to succeed and bring the best quality HMD to market!
