Is it worth getting a vive pro now?

[aoaaron]

Horses for courses I guess. I've used the Oculus Go and own a Pimax 8K. Neither have impressive LCD screens in my opinion. The Go had a very faded look to it. The Pimax 8K hits you with impressive FOV, but that soon wears off (at least for me) due to the lack of contrast (and I had it as good as I could get it via the infuriating PiTool).

Note that the original 8K like I've got has a pentile pixel arrangement - it's still impressively clear, on a par with my Vive Pro I'd say, but without the vivid colours and blacks. I'm sure an RGB stripe panel would look a bit sharper - if the 8KX has one of those in an OLED variety, I might be similarly tempted. The overall build quality and flimsiness of my Pimax leaves a lot to be desired though and mine lacks a decent headstrap and built-in audio. On the plus side, it's damned light compared to my Vives. Hopefully they'll manufacture the 8KX with better materials.

Yeah the original 8K and 5K and 5K plus look to be subsentially worse than the upcoming Pimax Artisan and Pimax 8KX based on distortion, comfort, build quality, audio and colour depth.

Obviously it is Pimax so you never know what exactly they're going to end up churning out but the CES footage and the Pimax day footage is all very reassuring.

If you even compare the Pimax 5k/8K to what ended up being generation 1 hardware (Vive/Rift), I'd say they are subtanially better than their competition (we were all just in love with OLED and decided to write off LCD until Valve & Oculus said "actually no, ur gonna like it".

The Vive Pro is for me a really missed oppurtunity. I wish HTC had committed to OLED and just re-designed the vive Pro with some QOL improvements, maybe seen if they could make the FOV slider a bit slicker and tried to make the FOV feel bigger than what it is with some ergonomical changes, improved the audio a bit and just re-sold it as a Vive 2 with the new re-designed controllers and a wireless adapator in the box.

I think that would have sold REALLY well and I personally would have thought long and hard about whether to go for Valve or a HTC headset which I can buy from a retailer and return/RMA/replace much easier than the Index offerings.

Its sad that HTC decided to not have faith in it and instead relegate it to somewhat legacy hardware and move towards the Cosmos. I feel they had a very decent product which needed small but important refinements to stay relavant against the Index; ultimately most heldback IMO by the vive wands showing their age.


Now we're looking at a VR landscape where HTC might not be around. If some of those users migrate to Pimax and allow Pimax to now have a serious go at moving forwards VR in their FOV-changing direction, I'd say its not the saddest moment in VR history but I fear 99% of the HTC owners have just gone to Valve due to the base station eco system.


On the whole OLED vs LCD argument, I'm not even going to pretend how much I miss OLED. I love OLED in VR, especially for dark games and I can't help but feel that we NEED to return to it at some point but manufacturers might now delay it because LCDs seem to be cheaper and can get us to the visual fidelity of 4k/8k per eye much quicker than what OLED panels are avaliable for a decent price and have a good pixel arrangement.