So today its the pimax chrystal launch(europe time),so i am curious what we can expect at our last day from the pimax 7th Anniversary Event

Yeah that would make no sense.

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Well they only said they “plan to anticipate” which means nothing. That’s like we look forward to thinking about. :grinning:

I was going to say they’re learning but they put the year as 2022. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

It ships with both lenses

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What is that in 8kx terms?

42ppd@potato

35ppd@small?

What’s the 8kx ppd again?

Yep, it was a last minute decision by Pimax. Originally it was one set only and second set at extra cost.

I think overall the Crystal is a good package if quality and functionality are good.

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About twenty.

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where did you find that info?, even vr-compare.com seems to be missing this.

if its true 35 will be nearly double the fidelity, with an even wider FOV…wow.

“…Pimax 8KX offers PPD of about 20.3…”

Yeh having that clarity over a huge fov will be very cool :+1:

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Are you talking about the Crystal? Compared to the 8KX? Then the FoV is 170 degrees (sort of, 150 are usable) on the 8Kx to 120 degrees horizontally on the Crystal, so much less FoV. Something had to give…

what do you mean “usable”?

peripheral vision is as usable as it should be?

Free of major distortions.

Hm. I don’t notice any major distortions- it just seems like a very slightly worse version of my normal peripheral vision to me. Dynamic foveated rendering would be useful though.
Still, I’m looking forward to the 12k.
I’m hoping to see some reviews of the crystal this month- from unbiased reviewers. That is, neither the ‘cheerleaders nor the haters.

Lucky you.

If I press the device against my face pretty hard, they are significantly reduced - but even if I could fix it in that position, the discomfort would be too much then. If I neither fix it nor redcue the FoV in PiTool, the distortion is pretty annoying because it is much lighter than the part of the scene should be (lens effect) and it draws my attention.
The experience of a distortion seems to be differing between individual users, but I recall that it wasn’t just a small minority who had that issue.

But I wouldn’t mind to have a FoV of 150° from the outset, even a bit less, 140° would seem the sweet spot with the currently available resolutions and GPU power to me. The issue then with the 8KX is that if I go for the normal FoV of it is allocating valuable parts of its resolution to an area I then de-activate when setting it to “normal FoV”, which means I get less resolution for my use than the device generally has available.

It’s a pity that Pimax didn’t aim for 140° horizontal for the Crystal. But okay, they might be closing that gap tomorrow, who knows. The main reason I am interested to try the Crystal is to see if it is a different story set up and quality wise than what I have learned to expect from Pimax. (and chances are that I might also be able try the Aero and Pico 4 when I happen to be at the venue… :wink: )

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It’s all about the distance between your eyes and the lenses. I do know the distortion you’re talking about. If the lenses are at the wrong distance, it will get that distortion around the edges.

For me, the correct distance that gets no distortion is in between their 11mm and 15mm facial gaskets. So I produced an in between by using the 11mm with a layer of double sided velcro.

Pimax should have (and still could if they wanted to) offered more adjustability in this area. And not with the padding, but rather by varying the shroud something like how the Reverb G2 version 2 did it.

If you’re using the 11mm and that isn’t thin enough, then I might suggest this one:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08JKNZHDQ

I used this one for a while, and it seemed to match the 11mm stock one more or less. At first. However, I found that it flattened out and became effectively thinner over time. That started pushing it into distortion territory for me, but perhaps for you it would have the opposite effect.

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That’s why eye relief would be such a welcome addition to pimax headsets. For a tinkerer it’s easy enough to work around it but out of the box for the regular users I believe eye relief would help so many problems with current pimax headsets. Next gen might not be necessary though, who knows!

Exact same for me. I find large FOV basically unusable but normal FOV setting is perfect, no distortions whatsoever (there were back in the day on my 5K+, but that improved with software and then with the 5KS and 8K X I stopped noticing distortion or issues at normal FOV at all.

I actually was flicking between FOV settings last night out of interest, and comparing with the Quest 2 (it’s honestly shocking when you go to it directly from a pimax headset, it’s borderline unusable). Anyway, I felt like normal to small was a big jump and hard to accept (small being similar to crystal), but large to normal was almost no difference at all imo. Like I could tell there was a reduction in FOV but I mean almost no difference in terms of experience or immersion. I’m sure actual full human scale FOV, like the 12k is claiming to get almost up to, will be a huge immersion improvement but point being is that 140 horizontal really does seem like a sweet spot. Not to forget the great vertical FOV of Pimax headsets.

Weirdly, the small FOV setting almost seems to feel worse because the vertical FOV stays the same. Of course I wouldn’t want less FOV but it does seem like the tall image makes the cut off sides seem more exaggerated, but that might just be me. I think I’d like an option to reduce vertical FOV slightly to get more performance honestly.

That all said, I like having the option to reduce FOV if desired. So of course more to begin with is ideal.

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I think that opinion is going to vary user by user heavily influenced by whether they’re experiencing warping at the edges or not. For me, I have been able to adjust the headset to have no such warping. So I really feel it when I go from large to normal FOV. It actually feels claustrophobic to me. Whereas a user who is experiencing warping is just blacking out the portions of the display with are largely unusable to them anyway.

To me, when such a user is claiming that 140 degrees is the “sweet spot” and no more is needed, it seems the same as Index or even Quest 2 users claiming they have plenty of FOV. I think they’re only saying that because they’ve never experienced better.

If you’ve never been able to have a view without significant warping at the edges in large FOV on an 8KX, then I would argue that you haven’t truly experienced large FOV. This seems to be impossible for some percentage of users. Hopefully the new lenses in the 12K address this issue.

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Well, I am able to see the large FoV as it should be if I press the device into my face, and I did compare it at the time. I felt is was „nice“ to have more FoV but no longer a substantial improvement for me. It was just so much in the peripheral view that it didn‘t do too much for me anymore. Perhaps the most advantage would come with racing games where the sense of speed is increased with peripheral FoV and noticing a car try to overtake your car asap is relevant too. But I will not need 200 degrees horizontally other than for some experiences which aim to immerse you completely with drawing much attention to the center, e.g. conscious existence, or simply 360 fotos & videos.

That said, if the resolution is just ridiculously high and reducing the FoV to 140-150 horizontally still leaves a state of the art resolution available (haven‘t done the math yet as I don‘t expect a fully functional 12K to show up any time soon), that might be fine and provide the added fun of full immersion for the occasional experience mentioned above.

So we’ve had a few days of the roadshow and the bottom line is Crystal is not ready. Hardware needs revisions. Software needs more work. Controllers need new parts. Battery life is bad.

I’ve now written off Crystal and don’t expect a working production unit to even surface at CES 2023.

Crystal was meant to be launched, in mass production, on sale to consumers but now the truth is out and Crystal is not shipping to customers. A few went to business and we’re told to fix the problems themselves.

I’m assuming Crystal production has come to a complete stop while they fix the hardware issues.

For me the gap between the true Crystal launch and the 12k is shrinking day by day and any reason to get Crystal is shrinking too. For a device that was suppose to come in October I’m guessing 3-5 months has been shaved off its life due to these delays.

I hope Pimax can sort the issues snd get back on track. Why they wanted to do these demos with such issues blows my mind.

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