So far Steve has the following:
Crystal 35ppd glass lenses 104 hFOV
Crystal wide FOV lenses 115 hFOV ( bad binocular vision, poor image quality)
Somnium VR1 plastic lenses 125 hFOV with light pressure 130 hFOV if he tightens it down.
Artur is looking at thinner cushions and just measured 136 hFOV.
Then Steve says the VR1 is much brighter.
People were speculating that the VR1 must be overdriving their panels to get better brightness.
Given the VR1 has two lenses spreading the exact same display's light over a wider area, this would indicate that they have
much less light loss going through two plastic lenses than the Crystal has going through a single glass lens. Obviously you can't create light that doesn't exist, but you can capture it more efficiently and route more of it to your eye balls.
I've asked Artur the following by means of a follow up based on a discussion with
@metalnwood.
"So would you say that you are capturing more of the total light off the display with the first lens and then focusing a higher percentage of the total light to the second lens with less light wasted?"
Pimax originally claimed the Crystal would have 125 hFOV and as much as 140 with wide lenses to be delivered later and ended up with 102-104 and ~115 for the(poor quality) wide lens and never released the 42ppd lens. So now you believe they are capable of making a 130 hFOV lens that is high enough quality for 15Mp displays?
Then you make comments about initial thoughts on pre-production VR1 lenses which included comments about the people looking at the VR1 which included Brad who had very bad things to say about the Crystal and who generally does not like aspheric lenses. The VR1 lenses have gone through many iterations since then vs. where they are now. Compare that to the Crystal actually shipped to many customers with very poor quality lenses that they had to replace later and shipped in boxes not made for them causing many to break in shipping making them unusable. They didn't come with working DFR because the software wasn't done yet. Then there were issues with the supplied cables, USB hubs, the better headphones had delays, etc.. etc..
Compare that with Steve saying that the pre-production VR1 worked out of the box and was as easy to setup as the Beyond.
I think Steve has spent a lot of time building his credibility in the VR sim community, and either he is lying about this and will lose that credibility when the VR1 goes out the door, or there is truth to what he is saying.
Time will tell.