For me it was shipped eight days after verifying my address. Mine was shipped on the 3rd July and should arrive on Monday (it’s currently stuck in Melbourne over the weekend) which means a weeks wait shipping from China to where I live in Australia, which is pretty good.
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See my schedule above.
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Looking forward to your thoughts.
Re one of our earlier discussions I’ve had more time with it now of course, and I think I can say I’ve noticed some screen door in the wrong conditions, but it’s almost… ephemeral. It’s there and then it’s not. I don’t want to say too much so as to colour your opinions before you see for yourself but will be interested if you notice anything.
If you really really pixel peep you can still see smooth surfaces are made up of tiny tiny pixels too, so it’s not quite reached that level where you absolutely can’t see the quantised units by which something is displayed but this is generally only evident on surfaces with very little texture and when I say evident, you have to be looking for it.
I’ve found local dimming very good right down to almost darkness, but there are definitely some blooming and odd effects happening when you have total darkness and sources of light in certain scenes.
One thing I’ve found interesting is that you can edit the config to change the local dimming to 0.01 (default in extreme is 0.00) and it prevents that last stage of fully turning off. The end result is something that loses out on those truly black blacks but you get no oddness or notable blooming and what for an LCD would be considered pretty decent black levels. Albeit not holding a candle to OLED anymore… use the less extreme presets and you lose out on a lot of contrast so worth experimenting with editing the config file itself. Note however if you switch to another local dimming preset it will wipe the local dimming config changes made in the file.
I’ve grown quite fond of my crystal after my less than stellar start with it… certainly not without its faults but hands down the best VR headset for sim use that I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.
Hope you enjoy yours when it arrives and I eagerly await your opinion!
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Thanks for that. I’m looking forward to my thoughts too, if the flaming thing ever arrives, lol. It’s still stuck at Melbourne airport, so probably won’t arrive today and maybe a day or so after. At least it cleared customs on arrival there and is currently at the FedEx distribution centre.
Your assessment related to the screen door effect is similar to what others have said. People don’t notice any unless you are really looking for it and then only in certain areas, like calm water. Otherwise it’s just not an issue it seems. I hate the SDE on the G2 and when flying near bodies of water I have to add some wind to give some waves to make it less obvious. Strangely the Pico 4 can have worse SDE, yet as you use your eyes to scan, rather than constantly having to move your head to get detail, the slight blurriness away from centre masks the SDE better.
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Update since this morning. My Crystal has now left Melbourne, in transit to Hobart. So I should get it tomorrow. Can’t wait to try it out.
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Thanks for the time frames guys. Hopefully I can expect to hear from them this week. The wait is killing me! 
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Tell me about it. I feel like a little kid counting sleeps before Christmas. 
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I’d be curious if anyone who bought the Crystal also has the Varjo Aero and whether it is really so much better that it would justify buying one if you already have the Aero?
I did the pre-order thing but just can’t quite justify to pull the trigger and order one. Are the field of view and colors and clarity really that much better?
Mine has just been delivered, seemingly in good condition. 
The new foam protector on the top strap mount has prevented that breaking in transit.
My timeline:
Pre-ordered 29th January
Paid in full 17th June
Confirmation email 25th June
Shipped 3rd July
Delivered 11th July
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Question regarding battery charging on the Crystal. As the Crystal comes with a power hub and not a separate fast charger, how long does it take to charge a battery on it? Can you use say a phone wall charger instead?
Well, like some people I did not have a bug free setting up of the Crystal, but after some faffing about I now have it working nicely.
I couldn’t get it to connect to the Pimax client and was wondering if the cable DP plug was in far enough on the headset (it was a really tight fit). But after rebooting the PC I got things working.
The trouble came when I started MSFS. Using either SteamVR or PimaxXR, as soon as I got into a flight it was unplayable. Any head movement at all was just a jerky mess, and this with lowered resolution as per some online suggestions. I updated the headset firmware, but it was still unplayable in the sim. Half Life Alyx worked fine though, in fact it looked incredible and the tracking was spot on, so it was not a failure of the inside out tracking on the Crystal. I came back to it after lunch though and suddenly everything worked. No idea what I had done wrong.
The view in MSFS though is fabulous, sharp as a tack and virtually no screen door effect. You can sort of see it in clear skies near the horizon, but it’s so small it’s just not an issue. So far then, I’m very happy with the visuals and the sound.
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I take it you got the glass lenses then? Any distortion at the edges?
Yeah, glass lenses. I didn’t notice any distortion, just some blurriness at the horizontal edges. The FOV is about the same as the Pico 4, but the lenses are better, although you have to be careful to get the height right with the top strap as CA fringing will become obvious. One thing I did notice, as with the Pico 4; as I have narrow set eyes with IPD of 59mm, the lenses pinch my nose. Not as bad as the Pico 4 though, which really hurt after a while. I’ll adjust the top strap a bit tighter and add a bit of foam for the bridge of my nose.
Anyway, early days for me and I’ll do a proper review in a week or so after I get to grips with all the settings etc.
Sounds like Eye Tracking is just around the corner so hopefully you get access to that as well soon and can make use of mbucchia’s Dynamic Foveated Rendering for PimaxXR.
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Yes you can charge it using a QC charger for the quickest charge, haven’t paid attention to it yet but I’d hazard a guess at a couple of hours that way.
I mean to plug it into my power brick that has data such as voltage and amps to see what it’s charging at that way but not got around to it yet.
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Anyone else having major headtracking issues using the Toolkit and PimaxVR? I’ve put a detailed description in the Toolkit thread to see if I can resolve this. Steam VR now works fine though.
For whatever reason it’s now working fine using PimaxXR. Beats me.
In any event, I’m really loving the visuals on the Crystal, they are exactly what I was hoping for. No need for MR even. Amazing clarity.
Do you mean PimaxXR?
Thanks, yeah I meant PimaxXR. My bad, typo. I’ve corrected it. Whatever, it’s all working now and is fantastic.
My Crystal has arrived:
Pre-order: March 25th
Payment: June 25th
Address confirmation: June 28th
Tracking number received (package picked by FedEx): July 6th
Delivery (Poland, European Union): July 13th
Package spent 3 days at Polish customs.
No additional charges in EU (no additional VAT, customs, customs processing fee).
Now the batteries are charging in preparation for the setup
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