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… 
)
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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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From what I’ve read there is definite work left to be done on it but still shows a lot of promise that would make me think it is way too soon to write it off. The impressions at this link seemed really balanced but still gave the basic impression that it is a very good headset even though its not quite ready yet…https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/81506-pimax-crystal-roadshow-event-berlin-through-the-lens-video/
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Wow this link is an absolute goldmine!!! Thanks for sharing. It sounds great, I can’t wait to see through the lenses of a crystal for myself.
When will independent reviewers get units?
Next month maybe MRTV gets a preview set, which won’t be a consumer release version yet, as it does not include all features. Pimax only wants to present features that fully work this time. Further units, especially those for most YouTubers will get sent out after CES 2023.
When will it be available in Europe, and what distribution channels will get used?
The initial consumer batches will be distributed to the reservations in the Pimax webstore and get shipped directly from Shanghai to the customers. The other main channel for distribution are Amazon FBAs. It will become available after the Chinese New Year Holidays in 2023 at the earliest. No fixed release date yet.
So seems like March at the earliest for the crystal launch. That makes sense and seems like the right choice, I would assume portal also gets pushed back. Pimax need to stop setting dates until they are truely ready but I guess it’s a management ‘technique’ at play here.
I’m more than happy to wait tbh. Thanks again for sharing that link!
lol and I got grilled for saying q3 2021 was overly aggressive.
Nevertheless I would rather a delay then an incomplete headset. But please Pimax…just stop with the release dates. You have literally never met one.
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thx for the link.
Great to see a positive review. Although I have a bit difficulties with his statement about the same sharpness as the aero over a larger FoV. That’s just technically impossible since they have the same amount of pixels. It’s possible he didn’t notice but there surely should be a difference. From what I understand the aero has roughly 40% more surface to fill so if you have the same amount of pixels that surely should be noticeable. It is possible that the panels do have a better fill factor but still you’ll lose detail, most noticeable in the distance.
BTW I’d never think I’d say this, I always figured sharpness is more important than FoV but at this point I think id prefer FoV over sharpness. That is, if the fill factor is good and you don’t see sde nor mura
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Interesting read indeed. This would mean that some core ingredients of the headset could really be good. My fear is that they will not manage to get all of the missing/incomplete features work well any time soon, and I won’t dish out 2 grand for a headset with lots of missing features, which may or may not be suitable for correction by firmware updates alone.
So effectively it means having to wait and see if they can over time manage to get it together, say in 12-18 months (long after what Pimax probably will consider good enough a state for release themselves). By that time we also have long term use experience from early adopters in the forum, so it would be a safer base for a purchase decision. I am okay with that.
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Not necessarily: the lenses of the Aero could blur the picture more than the Crystal lenses equalling out the details after all.
(But of course I know what the staff at the local retailers do when setting up the TV’s in the show rooms: all the more expensive products seem to be brilliant in comparison - until you notice that the same cheaper TV you have at home looks god-awful at the store because they played with the settings… so with all due respect to the team, I would be eager to read a review from an Aero owner who knows how good it can be (on comparable hardware, i.e. a system with an RTX4090) - having said that, I am not considering a purchase of the Aero, too many design decisions I am not thrilled about for the huge price tag; at 2 grand a headset needs to be feature complete and bloody brilliant)
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Yeah but the aero lenses are really sharp and clear
Speaking of the lenses, I read today that aspheric lenses don’t require as much of a distortion profile or something. Basically the statement was that with aspheric you can render closer to the actual panel resolution to get the full effect (opposed to fresnel where you need to render a fairly higher resolution). Is this true? If so it should mean that the crystal would actually be easier to run out of the box than the 8K X (ignoring any potential DFR etc).
Well the problem with aspheric of course that it doesn’t accommodate for pupil swim. I’ve read Crystal reviews from people who claimed they saw distortion and others who said they didn’t. Well, much is unknown about the Crystal lens design but if it were 100% aspheric you’d surely see distortion, there’s just no way aspheric itself can solve it. So I think the only way to solve it would be to have dynamic eye tracking enabled and use a distortion profile based on the iris position. But I guess that process in itself doesn’t necessarily slow things down, if the eye tracking is done in hardware and the distortion profiles are of course pre calculated. So yeah who knows, if it were true that it would be easier to render for an aspheric lens, then you might be right, even with dynamic distortion correction turned on. Although I would be suprised if the difference were to be substantial.
@zuiquan1 I agree completely. I’d far rather wait until they have a reliable and complete product. I think it’s better to do it right and polish Pimax’s reputation rather than rush it to market and wind up with bugs, returns and software issues. I think the fact that Pimax is being completely open at these roadshows in regards to issues that still need to be solved is a good sign, andI’m very hopeful that by spring 2023 we’ll likely have the Crystal and hopefully the 12k will be ready, or at least close. Kevin said, in the discord i think, that there was one technical issue that needs overcoming in the 12K, but that it IS progressing well.
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