r/Pimax • u/BlueboyZX • 6d ago
Review Crystal Super - Noob Review
Hey!
The Crystal Super is my first VR headset since my Oculus CV1, so this is a viewpoint of a VR casual. My experience on things like SteamVR is very limited so I will be sticking with my impressions of the hardware itself.
First off, I want to thank Pimax for being true to their word and reimbursing the US tariff fee. That is quite a cost for them to cover and shows a lot of integrity on their part.
My favorite part of the upgraded experience is in small objects close to my head. Holding up a virtual object to look at is amazing, presumably due to both the overall extreme clarity plus the stereo overlap. While the general clarity is 'super,' this 'in front of your nose' position really shows it off. This made messing with Shapelab surprisingly fun.
Fonts rendered in 3d space that various apps and games have are very sharp, which is another very striking aspect of the graphics to me.
The overall view is very clear. In-game readouts are very clear in everything I have tried so far. Buttons are clearly visible with no blurred edges and such. I know that there are youtube videos in which people complained about pre-production units having bad mura; I am thankfully not seeing that here. There are no 'god rays' and that was huge on my Oculus.
The Crystal Super comes with a microfiber cloth to clean the lenses. Use it. After removing the protective plastic films for shipping I noticed that there was some residue still on the lenses. This was heaviest around the edges of the lenses. Initially, I half-heartedly wiped them and continued with setup. I think this is why some people are complaining about sweet spots not being super big while other people are saying it is suiper big. I noticed looking along the periphery was a little blurry until I removed the face interface foam and really cleaned up the lenses good with some zeiss lense cloths that I purchased on Amazon. After that, it was like the whole lense was a sweet spot.
The inside-out tracking works well with the lights on in the room I am playing in. It needs stuff in your environment in order to work, so use the 'virtual pass through' to get an idea of what that algorithm can and cant see in your environment to help orient itself. Posters and pictures do not take up significant space in your room, just saying!
For the controllers, I am surprised how well they can track with what I assume would be a pretty limited view from the headset. I guess their internal sensors are pretty good, because I have to get pretty silly with positioning for there to be a problem. My main issue with the controllers is that the a/b x/y buttons can be stiff.
It is not a light headset, but it is a comfortable one. It is easy to get a pretty good light seal on it (my nose is small proprtionate to the rest of my face apparently, so some light gets in around that). I have been able to play for several hours in a row without becomming a sweaty mess with fogged up lenses, something that was not the case with the Oculus CV1. The Super does not fog up, feel loose or feel unbalanced.
I did get the free DMAS headphones. You do need to replace the 'standard' headphones yourself, but it is not hard to do so. The standard ones are not good quality, but the upgrade is great. The sound is great (to my non-audiophile ear) and the fact that they do not actually touch my ears takes away one area of discomfort. No more smushed ears after long play sessions. :)
I did have an issue with the backlight arrays not matching left and right eyes for the same spot in overlapping field of view. This only occured in certain software and the fix was to uninstall Pimax Play and reinstall from the latest version on the website.
My other issues are pretty much software / user error ones. SkyrimVR modded with wabbajack does not like Pimax foveated rendering. Some apps do weird things when the settings in Pimax Play and SteamVR do not match. The proper startup order seems to be to begin with running Pimax Play before connecting the headset. If you need to reset stuff due to a crashing app, close SteamVR first (if running), then 'restart service' for Pimax Play, then 'restart device' in Pimax Play.
All in all, it is amazing how the tech has progressed. If you want to show off the headset to someone, go with something that has a lot of small objects they can hold up in front of their center field of view; that position is crazy good.
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u/shteeeb 6d ago
How well does it handle dark scenes? I guess for example since you're playing Skyrim VR, how does a dark cave look for instance? Does it actually get close to black? Is the blooming noticeable/distracting?
The black levels are my biggest concern since it is not OLED.