Today at CES I have been able to go hands-on with two Pimax products: the Pimax Crystal Super and the 60G Airlink for wireless connection. Unluckily there was no Dream Air to try, but I had fun anyway with the two other products.
Before describing my experience, take in mind that CES has been very frenetic so my hands on these two devices lasted only a few minutes, not enough for an exhaustive review. To make things worse, the demo conditions were also terrible because of the poor network and the many interferences at the event venue. So take what I’m writing as just some “first impressions” that could change after an attentive product analysis.
60G Airlink hands-on
The 60G Airlink is a kit with a receiver and a transmitter that lets you stream your PC VR games to the standalone version of the Pimax Crystal over a 60GHz network, to guarantee ultra-sharp 2880 x 2880 resolution per eye, with a 90Hz refresh rate.
The demo we tried at CES was a bit of a Frankenstein demo with only the video of the experience streamed over the 60G network, and the rest streamed more traditionally. There were a bit too many cables around the 60G Airlink for the setup to be a normal one. The fact they could not just provide a standard setup shows that there is still some work to do with this product. To make things funnier, to shield the wireless streaming of this product from the network interferences of the show floor, Pimax constructed a sort of metallic cage where we had to make the demo. It was a bit of an absurd scenario, with us looking like tinfoil-hat people hiding ourselves in a tent while looking for aliens…
The hands-on involved playing Space Pirate Trainer on a PC, which was streaming the content to a Pimax Crystal headset that I was wearing and that was operating in standalone mode.
What I saw looked more like the result of a work-in-progress product than a finished solution. The streaming had a noticeable lag, and I could move my controllers and then see their virtual counterparts move after some time. I had also stutterings, with the streaming having noticeable problems in keeping the experience smooth. At a certain point, I even had everything freezing for like half a second. If I quickly moved my hand left or right, I could see the periphery of my vision becoming black because the system could not keep the pace of my movements. Visually, the streaming was quite good, though: I could play the game and enjoy it with no degradation in resolution or such. I also didn’t see any artifact due to the eye tracking at work to provide foveated rendering, so that to stream in high quality only a specific region of my visuals.
In general, I came out with the impression that the 60G Airlink still needs work before being ready for prime time. Pimax people said that the performances usually are better than the ones we have tried in the complicated conditions of the CES show floor, but I can only report the things that I saw.
Pimax Crystal Super hands-on
I am very happy that I have been able to try the Pimax Crystal Super, the headset with massive specifications that Pimax has promised to launch in a few months. According to Pimax, this is the most immersive headset ever released.
Specifications
These are the specifications of the device according to Pimax
- Resolution: 3840x3840x2
- PPD: 57
- Refresh Rate: 72Hz/90Hz
- FOV: 120° (Horizontal)
- Eye-tracking: Available
- Tracking: inside-out, SteamVR faceplate available
- Controllers: two controllers
- Audio: integrated
Design and comfort
The headset features the classical flagship Pimax design: it is black, bulky, and with a colored “V” sign on its front plate. It is not classy, but it should not be: Pimax devices are aimed at VR enthusiasts and this is not the category of people who want to see Apple-like designs. If you want to see how the headset looks like, I have shot as usual some pictures from all of its sides:
On the comfort side, the headset features a few adjustments to try to fit well the shape of the head of the user. You can close it around with your head with the classical rear knob, but then there is also another knob on the forehead, so you choose how to distribute your weight on the front part of your head. I’m not hiding from you that I’ve found the headset heavy and for this reason not very comfortable to wear for long periods. To support the abovementioned monster specifications, the headset has to be very bulky, and so heavy. Pimax told me they are still working on improving the comfort of the headset, maybe trying to balance it a bit more by changing the setup of the straps.
Visuals
On the visual side, Pimax Crystal Super showed all its best sides: the resolution was incredibly high and the visuals appeared to me as very detailed. The screen door effect was not present. The very high resolution was also paired with a very wide field of view, both on the vertical and the horizontal side, for a combo that made me feel very immersed in the virtual world. I started immediately to look for spherical aberrations and distortions in the periphery of the lenses, but I could not find much. There was a bit of chromatic aberration, but the periphery of the field of view did not show massive artifacts as I was expecting. This means that the wide field of view is effectively a wide field of view, not ruined by lateral distortions or strong aberrations. This is a great achievement, I was positively impressed by it
Until now I described the Pimax Crystal Super as a dream headset for immersion and actually it has the potential to be that. But… there are two big buts. The first one is that I’ve found the colors a bit washed out, especially the blacks. Nothing terrible, but still, I would have preferred something more vivid. The second, and worse one, is that there was a big warping on the images. Moving my head around, I could see all the visuals distorting like if was looking at reality through a fish bowl… not as big as in a fish bowl, but still very noticeable. This was hurting my experience.
Pimax told me that they are aware of this problem and it will be fixed by software before the release of the device. This is really good news.
Controllers
The controllers of the device looked a bit like the controllers of the Quest 2, with the classical two buttons, thumbstick, grip button, trigger button, menu button, and an additional Pimax button. They had a tracking ring. The experience used for the demo was not made to test the controllers, so I can just say that they were normal controllers like there are many in the VR space. Nothing bad or good to talk about here.
Final considerations
Pimax showed me products that were still work-in-progress. But while the 60G Airlink left me with the impression that there is still a lot of work to do, the Pimax Crystal Super gave me hope. I think that this headset, with its wide FOV and resolution, can provide great immersion, more than what is currently available on the market. But to do that, it has to solve its problems with the weight and especially with the distortion profile of the lenses. I hope that by mid-year, they will be able to sort it out.
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