Today WideFoV lenses for my Pimax Crystal Original arrived and unfortunattely - I don’t like them. I don’t complain as I have been warned by several reviewers and even by Pimax, but I decided to fully exploit the modularity features of the Crystal Original for which I paid - one of them are the interchangeable lenses.
The issues:
- The added FoV is rather small. Probably I would notice it after several sessions with WideFoV lenses and then returning to the regular lenses, but the first look through the WideFoV lenses was without any wow effect.
- The lens barrel of WideFoV lens is higher vs. the regular lens (even the mounting screw is longer) so it obscures the abilitiy for the left eye to look right and vice versa. The reviewers call it reduction of the binocular overlap. WIth the regular lenses I barely notice this effect (in real world there is still my nose obscuring the view), with the WideFoV it is highly noticeable for me (it may depend on the skull shape - I’m the European type, big head, 62.5 IPD).
- The sharp area of the view is way smaller, it was a bit like going back to Reverb G2 (just the sharp area, not clarity, contrast, brightness for which Crystal is way better than the G2 with the plastic Fresnel lenses). I was unable to find a headset postition on my face - either the bottom of the image was relatively sharp or the up, never both. Left and right peripheral areas were also uncomfortably blurry (foveated rendering was disabled, headset correctly detected the BigFoV lens profile, I reset the headset by removing the battery and disconnecting the cable after lens installation).
- Unlike with regular lenses, chromatic abberation was cleraly visible outside the 50% of the FoV centre.
When I donned the headset with the regular lenses installed back - it was like coming home again…
The results my be different for you, some users are happy with WideFoV lenses, you may see this review for example:
