This has alot to do with the fitment and having a pimax compatible head. I see alot of distortion in large fov, but with the thick foam I don’t notice the distortion.
I guess he can only review for his own experience.
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So you see how different it is for each person. I need to use the thin foam… and i even need a thinner foam to get rid of the distortion…
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I can totally understand if someone put 8kx on for the first time and didn’t know about the eye to lens distance adjustments, and feel cheated by some positive reviews of the 8kx. The difference is really that much. I had my ‘wtf did i just bought?!’ moment lol. thick foam came months later so i didnt get the best experience out of the box straight away.
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Whatever I try, even if I totally remove the gasket so that the lenses are touching my eye lashes, I still have distortion. Tried literally everything and never can get it completely right. Not sure what to think about those people who say they don’t see any distortion at all anymore or claim they’ve totally solved it. Honestly I find it hard to believe since it just doesn’t make much sense to me, since I tried it all
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Well, there is nothing to gain for me in making a false claim, in any shape or form to defend pimax in any way. But my experience is that, with a thin foam its a distorted mess at edge, with thick foam its gone. I’m asian, my eyes are more flat as to deeper in the skull.
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Well I thought I needed the thick foam, turns out thin is fine, just had to angle the headset a lot from my cheeks and it keeps the reported FOV numbers, so it’s not a drastic mod. If only the 8KX had the adjustments the Index has (eye relief knob and tilting it keeps it at that angle) then there would be a lot more positive reviews imo.
I don’t really understand the distortion either. When I wear my glasses, I get near zero distortion. If I take off my glasses, its distortion for daaaayyyyys, and its unplayable. And I have zero idea why that is.
Unrelated, I really wish whoever did the Tom’s hardware review had a small IPD. Its the one thing that is going to sour so many people that see this review and buy the headset. Anything less than 64ishmm, and they are going to struggle, and ultimately they will be disatisfied, especially if they come from a more IPD friendly device.
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@Djonko Has it ever occurred to you if the outer area distortion is possibly coming from your eyes? Have you tried (without glasses) look on a straight 5m line 3m away in real life to see if it was peripherally distorted? High intraocular pressure make this. Just a thought.
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Haha. If it was coming from my eyes, then I wouldn’t complain about distortion in the headset now, would I? My eyes are perfectly fine, 20/20 vision. Most of the headsets I own are perfectly distortion free. I saw some very slight distortion on the G2, somewhat more on the 8k-X and a lot on my Varjo VR3. But for example StarVR, Vive Pro org, Vive Pro 2, Odyssey+ and the index are 100% distortion free.
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Yes, but you see only 110-120 Degree or so 
There is no peripher sight possible in this HMDs…(excl. StVR)
For me, the only small distortion, wich i can see, is in the outer edges, the last 4-5 degree in wide mode.
And i can you say, in real life, the eyeballs at this outer position, my sight is also not so fine
It’s the outer edges of the whole lense, so unfortunately also around the part of your nose. You can easily see if it you close one eye and look around.This is why even on normal you’ll see distortion.
I don’t have any distortion on the inner part of the lens. The slight distortion that I can see in some titles is at the very edges only. On some games I can’t see any at all even when looking for it
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Did you also try with closing one eye? That way it’s much easier to spot. I mean if you use both eyes then the eye not looking through the edge will not see distortion, but the other one will
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I’ve seen exactly what you mean with inner distortion. With every other headset I’ve used, the closer to the lenses I was, the better the picture, but not the 8KX, till recently. I previously thought the 8KX had fishbowl distortion around the whole viewing area, inner and outer, but the clarity in the center was amazing. Thick foam fixed the fishbowl, but clarity and binocular overlap were bad. Once I got close to the 8KX lenses and then angled the bottom of the headset out from my cheeks with the thin foam I had good clarity, good overlap, and no inner/outer distortion. Using my actual IPD of ~69 and no other IPD adjustments. it’s good, but slight movements can throw it off. The inner/outer edges are now just “blurry” due to the lens design if I strain to look rather than distorting the image, which of course was distracting even when not looking to the edges.
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In the middle i have only the stupid nose shadow, no distorsion. (moddet face gask)
.But, maybe the difference between us is that in 2021 I don’t expect from a piece of home technology, especially with cantet displays, to get a look like through a freshly cleaned window.
In 5-10 years, with curved screens and in the middle closed aspherical lenses maybe.
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from the article:
Incoherent Resolution Settings
One of the most confounding things about the Vision 8K X is SteamVR’s inability to pick a consistent resolution and aspect ratio for the panels. Every time we changed the refresh rate, the panel resolution would change along with it. The only pattern we could discern is that the lower the refresh rate, the higher the resolution.
We suspect that the Pimax is pushing the bandwidth limits of part of the headset, which is why the resolution changes with the refresh rate adjustment. SteamVR seems to be compensating for the higher refresh rate by lowering the rendered resolution.
The incoherent resolution configurations made it very difficult to evaluate the performance. We couldn’t test 60 Hz versus 75 Hz directly with the exact resolution because SteamVR renders differently for each one.
This reads like they left steamvr super sampling on AUTO even after bragging about how great it looked at 100%…so they let AUTO whip around the ss settings willy-nilly then act all confused that the resolution (and therefore clarity) has changed. What’s so confusing that they couldn’t figure it out by the deadline? they could have just moved the slider back to 100% if they didn’t like what AUTO chose, nothing to do with limitations of pimax hardware as they suggest.
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The slider, and especially values below or above 100% in SteamVR, are a mystery for many users. 
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you are right, the reviews are done just by myself. I would love to have more people collaborate, but the geographical difference makes that impossible.
Most of the team is in New York. I live in Canada.
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The ratio between the horizontal and vertical resolution changes when you change the refresh rate of the headset.
Setting it to 100% for all refresh rates does not give a true one to one representation. Letting it run at auto was an attempt to at least have a similar bandwidth requirement for each run to give something tangible to compare.
It’s far from a perfect solution.
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Nice to have the author in the thread, my response to you is that I suppose I don’t understand the value of comparing for equal cable bandwidth, why is this information useful to control for? for me at least a far more valuable metric is frame rate. so on a given hardware, with all other variables locked what is the impact on fps between fov settings. what is the COST of going from small to normal, normal to large when utilizing the full consistent 100% steamvr resolution for those fovs (and identical in-game graphics settings).
Some depth of what the render target is at different fov’s is also useful to mention so readers can better compare to their render targets on any hmd’s they may already own. you could really blow their minds if you talked about the 8kx large fov and its nearly 10,000 pixels by 3160 pixels target to render across both eyes, and if you enable parallel projection that inflates the pixel count another 30%. that’s the kind of wakeup call people need when trying to understand why even an rtx 3090 wont run an 8kx without sacrifices in many games. what actually ends up as signal on the cable is much less useful to worry about, at least in practice.
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