I also warning about buying a pimax headset, especially for newcomers, but it’s not because Pimax HMDs are bad, they are not a all, but they are hard to setup & get maximum from them, so it’s why it’s suitable only for a some kind of people with technical background or which willing to jump in & try to do lot of tinkering, forums reading to achieve the best experience.
I don’t mean Pimax HMDs are too overcomplicated, it’s really easy to setup once you get HMD & start some game (if Pitool has no bugs lol, which wasn’t case for me when I got my 5k+ at 2019/12, it ended in 7 hours debugging, but it’s rare case I never had such an issue later, including experience with my new 5k XR)
But you know it’s not a complete product until recent changes with smas/das & comfort kit, you need to buy strap, audio, base stations & controllers at least to start enjoy it, on top of it you need to optimise your performance settings, be aware about different 3d nvidia settings (or radeon like antialising & other onces that drastically affects the picture quality & performance) also PC specs much more higher than on other HMDs, it’s just too way expensive, but price tag is fair enough, on top of it the FOV is what makes it hard to setup & adjust on head to get picture look good & make it distortionless, I believe there is some % of ppl who won’t be able to achieve distortion wise good picture due to physiological specifics. So if a person is an average user who doesn’t care about those things - just skip it & get something mainstream, it’s the advice, it’s not coz Pimax is afwful & it’s a scam, it’s not, it’s really decent HDM.
But it’s like a constructor KIT, I would recommend it for people who consider some current mainstream HMD problems like FOV, comfort, modularity, weight, exposed settings (as mainstream HMD don’t provide it apart of few ones, in steam vr it’s better than on Oculus in terms of settings exposing but still poor, e.g you can’t achieve true black on Vive Pro & it kills some really dark scenes, on Pimax there are lot of updates & developers implement some features that were requested by community), also for people with vision issues pimax allows to mitigate some of the issues by having that great IPD software offsets (vertical, horizontal) on top on physical IPD adjustment, also lenses are different a bit & you can achieve more 3D immersion, but it’s subjective & strongly settings dependent, also refresh rates, great pixels density & SDE along with some other minor benefits.
But it should never be your first HMD IMO, you need to have hassle free HMD as well to enjoy your VR & tinker once you have a mood for it, in a while you can end in having your Pimax as a daily driver. Sure there is tiny percentage of people who will be able to cope with it as a first HMD & probably will enjoy it, but it a big money burn lottery (but you always can sell it).
In this regards Index or Quest are rock solid & are very good hassle free HMDs (apart of Quest’s comfort issues)
Also one of the others most important factors for me due to which I won’t reccomend Pimax HMD are poor contrast & blacks, Index has same issues, colours good & contrast better on Index but it’s still not as good as on OLED, but Im in the OLED camp & there are many ppl that don’t care about it. So I don’t include it usually in my reccomendations.
