So I’ve owned an OG Crystal from the start (complete with heavy battery pack) and decided to “upgrade” to a Crystal Super OLED. I saw that they offered a $399 credit to OG owners so I took advantage of that. I was really excited for the MicroOLED, because I had a Samsung Odyssey before and it was awesome. But once I got the Crystal Super, it really let me down big time. SO MANY ISSUES! I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll list them in random order
- No shutdown function like my OG had. The headset literally runs all the time, even in standby. That can’t be good for longevity. Support’s answer was to just unplug it lol. Really, you couldn’t do a software shut off? I can’t imagine the constant abrupt disconnect/reconnecting would be good for longevity either
- Resolution did not look all that different from the OG, despite being basically 4k per eye. In fact my OG looked SHARPER! Especially edge to edge sharpness. It seems like the resolution was the “same” around the center of the OLED, but looking with just the eyes to the edge looked softer than my OG. Yes I did have eye tracing and foveated rendering dialed in.
- FOV felt smaller than my OG. Against despite being bigger on paper. I think both the resolution and FOV have more to do with the lens type (pancake vs aspheric), and if that is the case this is a clear example of paper specs not living up to reality.
- Colors were absolutely spectacular on the OLED. Black levels insane. The black levels and contrast were so good that older unity titles with pure blacks had some kind of color banding in which black shadows showed rusty orange bands. Again, not a fault of the headset, MicroOLED doing its job but it did affect some older titles I like to play.
- No optical engines to buy separately to alleviate the above, I was willing to purchase a 50PPD qled module. And it’s not just out of stock, Pimax is apparently refusing to sell them outright.
- CONSTANT disconnects. This was extremely frustrating. I couldn’t tell if the disconnects were coming from the USB port side, the display port side, or from the cables on the headset side. It just seemed random. I did notice that the optical engine compartment LOVED slipping out of place if I held the headset wrong. And it didn’t like to snap back in either.
- Even with a studioform face foam and top comfort strap that I bought, I felt like I had to severely overtighten the headset just to get close to the lens and get good fov.
- The last part is the best. After a few days, the headset started overheating severely. I mean really hot to the touch. The it stopped working. The error was “sensors cannot track headset” and host of USB connection errors. Didn’t matter which USB port I used (and I have a lot of 3.2 ports in the rear of my motherboard).
That was basically enough for me. Didn’t want an exchange it, I opened a ticket for a 14 day return window refund. The constant disconnects was aggravating enough, but this is clearly a badly designed unit and something is wrong with Pimax QA because I did my research and there are ALOT of issues with the Super and even the Dream Air. My Crystal OG has been rock solid for years (after all the appropriate aftermarket straps, foams, and a 3rd party USB hub to replace the brick). Was expecting the Super to be just as solid with the only thing to do is get a comfort strap and foam. Little did I know.
