8KX User Reviews

Heliosurge · July 6, 2020, 5:23pm

LoneTech 8kX Part 1

IMG_20200706_102446_00_0513040×1520 2.28 MB

It arrived after a week in shipping. Having waited nearly three years, that’s a small thing. I’ll mainly be comparing to the 5K+, which I have upgraded with a Vive audio strap. The pink pieces are 3D printed adaptors.

Installation was quite simple; I plugged it in (including a second USB port, I’m really going to appreciate not needing that separate AC adaptor), and PiTool detected it rather quickly. SteamVR wasn’t so lucky, but it sorted itself out after I’d paired the Vive controllers and rebooted. That reboot revealed another quirk; my BIOS seems to have thought the 8K X was a monitor, because I couldn’t see my boot loader. Swapping DP connectors sorted that out. It was never an issue with the 5K+ simply because I didn’t have it powered on during boot. After the reboot Windows also ignored the keyboard, but replugging that helped. All in all, a typical Windows day.

In other happy news, it appears the Yaw VR Game Engine plugin for Elite Dangerous now works (the beta version of the game engine was just updated, downloaded it from the website).

Back to the 8K X itself. It has a blue rubbery casing, and silvery wedge and buttons. The power button still did nothing in SteamVR; I’d love to rebind it as a system button. Pimax Home and SteamVR both render neatly. I can only resolve the pixels in part of the display (central), but be aware I’m a bit of a resolution geek; I found the iMAX cinema to use silly low resolution, and think my 27" 2560x1440 monitors are just acceptable at arm’s length. “Screen door effect” is not technically eliminated, but in practical terms no longer a factor of concern. I can just tell there is a raster, and it would be surprising otherwise; 2160 is a big number but still not a match for human vision. I could still tell some aliasing based creeping in the periphery in Pimax Home.

The comfort kit with the much larger facial interface, rigid audio strap, and nose gaskets is a huge upgrade. The foam still has the glasses cutouts on my model, but that’s the only remaining point of external light leaks. I noticed some on the right side, but that’s with a bright light in that specific direction. As for the audio - it’s small speakers, they don’t sound terrible for such but I doubt it will work very well with positional audio. Verified the microphone worked with Discord.

I probably won’t read here for a while as I’m now going to try running actual programs.

Part 2

Early impressions with my 8K X [Review]

Quick impressions from Elite. The Yaw VR Game Engine default profile did not play nicely with the set limits; it would basically twitch when I passed over the small range of orientations that were mapped, and what motion there was felt backwards. That has nothing to do with the Pimax, but it’s also a new toy. Bumping up HMD quality factor a few steps in Elite helped quite a lot; text is easier to read than in the 5K+. Blacks look pretty good; it’s obviously backlit, but the lack of competing impressions makes it a background thing, like looking through air. As for the optics, it’s a slightly mixed bag. When looking straight ahead, the distortion profile is excellent. However, when glancing to the side I seem to move my pupil out of the sweet spot, and get edge distortion. Furthermore, it looks like I’m looking past the edge of the lens (!) - there’s a band of clearer display past the milkiness of fresnel ridges. “God ray” effects seem less pronounced, probably largely because there’s not much leakage. Also, the one thing that helps more than having a button to reach Elite’s main menu (“pause”, by default Escape) is knowing where that button is. And my X52 Pro had calibrated center to the wrong position when the Yaw VR was pitched down on boot, quickly resolved by unplugging the HOTAS. I don’t seem consciously disturbed by 75Hz in Elite, but it may well be tiring. And I’m not sure I have quite the right fit with the head strap. Note that some of the distortion effects could well be affected by the use of parallel projections, though I did dare to set it to large field of view.

On the sad side, with Elite’s excellent audio design, it’s immediately obvious that the SMAS audio just isn’t anywhere near good enough. The audio is tinny and easy to pinpoint. It beats not having any earphones, but I am going to upgrade, one way or another.