PICO 4 All-in-One VR Headset UK 128GB

PICO 4 All-in-One VR Headset 128GB

Many advantages of the Pico 4 only exist on paper. The higher resolution and the larger field of view are hardly noticeable in practice.

On the other hand, some kind of smearing or ghosting and reflections in areas with high contrast plague the image. The screen-door effect is clearly visible, partly because of some kind of “bubbles” or “holes” that appear quite irregularly in the pixel grid.  The image generally appears quite dark with washed-out colors. God-rays, on the other hand, are mostly gone.

The smaller form factor and the significantly lower weight are positives. However, a suboptimal head strap design immediately negates any comfort gain from the lower weight.

Tracking and the new VR controllers work very well. The Pico Store grows very slowly, but Wi-Fi streaming and streaming via USB-C cable from Steam worked well enough for me – if there are no bugs like broken sound transmission.

If you trust your data with Bytedance more than Meta, if you can live with the risk of various bugs, and if you aren’t concerned with the aforementioned problems, the Pico 4 is a viable alternative to the Quest 2.

Resolution, colors, refresh rate, and color passthrough

• The higher resolution is barely noticeable.
• Colors wash out, and the picture is comparatively dark.
• The picture has an excellent general edge-to-edge clarity, but looks “smeared” in high-contrast scenes or blurred due to reflections.
• God-rays are almost non-existent.
• The screen-door effect is clearly visible because it is not homogeneous, but has “holes”.

Pico 4 has a resolution of 2,160 x 2,160 pixels per eye – higher than Pico Neo 3 Link and Quest 2, but the difference is hardly visible in practice. I think I can recognize a slightly better readability when I look closely.

The colors of the LC display look washed out and darker overall in direct comparison with the Quest 2. This is probably due to the new pancake lenses, which are much larger than the previous Fresnel lenses and do not have the typical Fresnel rings.

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