Welp, that was a fail

[BeastyBaiter]

Been really enjoying my Rift since summer but the low resolution finally got to me. Thus I broke down and went to the local Microsoft store at the mall and picked up a shiny new Samsung Odyssey. Now before Zenbane shits a brick, it turned out to be a bit fail. I have no idea how Samsung managed to pull this off, but despite having vastly superior lenses (no more death by lens flare) and roughly 30% better resolution with the same FoV, it's harder to read instruments in DCS and I swear it's lower resolution overall. I honestly wasn't expecting that at all, the whole point was to get better image quality, not worse!

On the flip side, loading up Robo Recall and From Other Suns with it was far less of a hassle than I was expecting. Plan to return it tomorrow though. I just can't figure out how lower image quality with better lenses and screens is possible. It does have much better contrast and colors though, I will give it that. Really stunning looking if it weren't for the impossibly low resolution. Not a super sampling issue either, tried the same settings (steamVR vs steamVR and in game vs in game, I know OTT uses a different measurement). I even went full retard with the Odyssey and crushed my 1080 TI with super sampling, the Rift still appeared higher resolution with only modest super sampling (1.7 PD for Odyssey vs 1.3 PD for Rift in DCS).

[Wildt]

Here's another recent contradictory comparison by someone who allegedly has most HMDs on the market.
On the negative side, he reports god rays in the same league as the Rift.

[cybernettr]

I bought an Avagent Glyph a while back, which shoots its images directly onto your retinas, and while I can see this as being the future of vr and everything else someday, the fov is still a bit disappointing, and if you don’t stare directly at the image, it dims slightly, because it needs a straight path into your eyeball. Just follow the timeline, as we are heading into the 2020s and can expect awesome advances in the next decade. 

[LZoltowski]

Fresnel Lenses will always give you god rays, it's how light bounces along those ridges. Oculus did something using Hybrid Fresnel lenses to minimise the effect. As long as they keep using them, they will always be a god rays effect, they can reduce it but never get rid of it .. they could go with glass, but that would add a lot of weight and extra cost.

[falken76]

Wildt said:

@RedRizla - Thanks for the report. I guess I'm gonna have to try it out for myself before ordering anything with this resolution bump.

In contrast here's what UploadVR thought:

"To put it simply, to my eyes the Odyssey’s visuals improve upon Rift and Vive in every way. At CES we also tried the Vive Pro, which uses the same resolution Samsung display. It wasn’t a lot of time with the Vive Pro and we didn’t try them side by side, so it is hard to comment more about the optical differences between the two. But we are left with the overall impression that Odyssey’s clarity — from resolution to lenses — currently leads the industry. In a CES demo provided by NextVR using the Odyssey, the company showed how crisp a captured scene can look in the Odyssey. It is hard to go back to the decreased resolution after experiencing the improvement."

I have a hard time believing these reviews are not done by paid hacks any more these days.  Ever since I learned that Makerbot won CES awards for their Makerbot Generation 5 printers only to later find out that those printers were never functional for the show and all the display pieces that were shown were actually printed on 4th Generation Replicator 2 and 2x printers.  That means those bastards that gave them the awards never saw the damn things in operation, nor the glue lines for the pieces glued together on the large build plate printers.  So that makes me believe they were paid off to give fake reviews.  The damn printers were plagued with clogging issues that pretty much ruined their brand name

When the reported user experience as it is written by the OP is compared to the review written by UploadVR, it makes me think UploadVR is another bullshit Makerbot style paid review.

[falken76]

BeastyBaiter said:

To answer some questions, no, I couldn't see individual pixels but after about 12 hours of tinkering, I think I know what the issue is. It seems to use the cheater resolution technique the current Vive uses. What seems to be going on is while the Rift uses 3 subpixels per pixel (1 red, 1 green, 1 blue for each pixel), the Odyssey does not. It uses 1 subpixel and then shares the other 2 subpixels with its neighbors. This is just a guess on my part, but it explains shimmering I would see around object edges in some games and why text was harder to read. If I'm right, the Odyssey is actually running at about 2/3rds the resolution it claims due to the subpixel setup. That would make it lower resolution than the Rift.

Unfortunately this isn't reflected in GPU usage. In DCS, the Rift eats 5.5 GB of VRAM in a test mission I have, the Odyssey eats 8.5GB at the exact same settings in that mission. The Rift also maintained 90 fps (just barely) while the Odyssey mostly hung out in the 60-70 fps range.

As for why reviewers would say the Odyssey looks better. That's because it does at first glance. The displays are far more vibrant. I was truly blown away the first time I put it on and loaded up the Microsoft Home. It just looks incredible compared to the Rift. Even in DCS where reading text was harder, the initial impression was excellent.

In high contrast scenes, the Odyssey also lacks the massive godrays the Rift has. It does have a little bit of bright blur in extreme cases, but it is far less distracting. Additionally, the SDE is noticeably lower. By SDE I mean the gaps between pixels. I really can't see them in the Odyssey. But as said, the actual resolution seems to be lower despite having more "pixels" and less of a gap between them.



edit:

As a side note, the controllers for it are certainly usable. They don't detect if your finger is touching the trigger or if your thumb is touching the touchpad/stick or not, so pointing is out but they otherwise work well. They aren't as ergonomic as the Rift's, but are are still good. Tracking was spot on too for the most part, though I had to be careful about reaching down to my hips to grab guns. I found it best to look down a little when doing so. Not having to deal with sensor LoS was an improvement too, but I have a dodgy Rift setup at  home due to limited space and a pet rabbit that likes the taste of electricity.

I gave FO4 VR a try while I was at it, the controls suck just as hard with touchpads imho. Actually I think they sucked more despite the game being designed exclusively for them instead of our Rift stick hacks. I just couldn't feel where the center was so I kept switching pages in the inventory when I meant to scroll down instead.

Uggghhh, that sounds terrible, it's like Hooking the Amiga 500 up to a Commodore composit monitor using the A520 RGB to Composit adapter.  The text would bleed on the screen because the composit monitor was not near the quality of an RGB monitor, more like an old CRT TV.  I imagine that is exactly what the text would be like reading on one of these HMDs not using all 3 subpixels.

[Anonymous]

I tried the Samsung Odyssey at a Best Buy where they had it setup (waited in line 15 minutes). I was there to buy a Rift - and figured I'd give a try to see if I got the VR motion sickness (I didn't). But I found the controllers kind of terrible - but the headset tracking was good enough. I ended up ordering the Oculus Rift direct online as they had none in store - the Samsung looked nice enough but they made me take my glasses off so I figured the fuzziness was because of my terrible eyesight. I do get the god rays in the rift (I think my glasses make it slightly more pronounced) - but they aren't so terrible that they take away from the immersion. As for the SDE - I was expecting it to be much more pronounced, but it the effect that I get is almost closer to scan-lines which I kind of like.

[Anonymous]

Us glasses wearers have got an advantage where god rays are concerned I think, because at night we see them all the time so we're used to them.

[Anonymous]

I wonder if the variation in reviews is just poor quality control?
Some get well setup lens and some not so much.

[Anonymous]

snowdog said:

Us glasses wearers have got an advantage where god rays are concerned I think, because at night we see them all the time so we're used to them.

LOL - so true, I have had glasses for so long now that I barely notice the visual clutter.