I can understand people feeling upset that the 8K is perceived as a worse headset than the 5K+ but this does not imply some sort of evil plan from Pimax to screw us all over. I mean seriously people, If Pimax really wanted to screw us over they would have released the v1 prototype in Jan 2018 and called it a day. Or even worse, not delivered anything at all and just taken our money and run.
Lets take a step back and logically look at the following facts.
At the start of the Kickstarter there were 3 options for Pimax HMDs, 5K, 8K and 8K X. 5K+ was not developed at that point.
No company should stand still when developing technology, and Pimax are no exception. They continued developing and improving and as a result they came up with the 5K+. The 5K+ is an evolution of the 5K and it happens to have pros and cons against the Pimax 8K. It is not a conspiracy this happened, they are not messing with us, if anything they were honest about it and decided to give us even more choice.
We are getting an option to go for what can be argued to be a better all round HMD and giving us a $100 voucher to use as a bonus. Hardly the sign of an evil mastermind company out to screw us all over.
The original and in hindsight optimistic delivery for Pimax date was January 2018. Had this by some miracle been met, we would now be using our chosen HMDs for 8-9 months and the Pimax 5K+ would just the logical next evolutionary step in Pimax’s HMD line up.
I agree and am disappointed that Pimax had some aims that were not met. But overall they have delivered what by all accounts from the reviews and tests so far, are an excellent set of products.
Regardless of your choice, both the 5K+ and the 8K will be excellent HMDs with some pros and cons from each. They are both far beyond the experience delivered by all other existing consumer HMds, of that ALL reviewers and meetup testers are unanimous. The only area that could arguably be a step back is the black levels. So essentially Pimax are in the position where they are competing against themselves. Want a bit better clarity and higher Hz, go for the 5K+. Want better colours and less SDE, go for the 8K.
Stop with the daft conspiracy theories and cut Pimax some slack.because the absolute worst mistake we can accuse Pimax of, is lack of communication from them re technical specifications of the 5K+.
Well the way the 5K+ came about does add to the feeling of wtf.
They messed around getting the lenses to span 170 degrees but while doing that they just wasted a substantial portion of the panels. I don’t know how R&D goes in this respect but it seems wrong. Then a simple solution to use a smaller panel in front of the overly small lens fixes the area utilization problem and thus the 5K+ was created. It seems a weird new product when the reason seems to be some pretty daft optical design failure.
But I guess the M1 leaks are very much to blame for all of us focussing on this. If only we would have never known…
The issue seems to have been the move to mass production of the lenses from the original custom lens that was used in the demonstrations to sell the Kickstarter. We now have a worse optical solution that is much cheaper to produce and hence meets mass-production goals but hurts image quality on the bigger panel 8k.
The lense design had been similar from v2 to current. And is also similar to StarVR; just use pucs that show the fresnel ridges & think topographical map.
Correct me if I am wrong but Pimax always stated a 200 degree FOV was diagonal, not horizontal. Their own promotional video on Kickstarter showed this. Reviewers are saying the FOV of 170 is for the horizontal, which would work out around 200 diagonal FOV?
The CV1 for example has a stated FOV of 110 degrees, and that equates to around 95 degree FOV horizontal.
200 diagonal IS 170 horizontal. So, nobody is wrong here.
But my point was that they were trying to get that span working but they should have tried to get that span working while also not waste panel size. Obviously. The fact a smaller panel fits is really strange. They should have just put in a smaller panel then and never speak of a new model.
Its entirely possible that a smaller 4k panel just doesn’t exist yet. 4k phone sized panels are fairly new and very high pixel density making them relatively expensive vs. the more standard 1440p panels in the 5k. There are also many more sizes available at 1440p which gives them more options to work with. Another thing you have to remember is that there is always going to be some panel waste due to not wanting to show the edges of the screen when looking through the lens. The Rift probably did the best with this as their screens are basically at the limit when it comes to utilization but I would imagine this is harder to achieve in a much larger field of view due to the way the optics have to work. Not saying they couldn’t have done a better job but considering that no other company is building an HMD even close to this spec below $1000 I would say they knocked it out of the park.
EDIT: At this point it is probably worth observing that if you have a 16:9 rectangle that is 175mm wide, it will have a diagonal that is 200mm. That is not FOV, though, nor an angle, and not something you measure in degrees. Unless somebody can demonstrate how the 170-200° thing would work, I’ll chalk this up as an honest case of not thinking something all the way through, on Pimax’s part. I made this exact same mistake myself, back when SweViver “dropped the FOV bomb”.
