Get a glimpse of the stunning fidelity
Photos don’t do Beyond justice as it’s impossible to replicate the human eye. Camera sensors and lenses introduce artifacts that the human eye doesn’t see. However, the photography below will give you a taste of what to expect.
BlackMagic 6K · Radiant Vision AR/VR lens · 5/25 fps · 1/10 shutter · ISO 500 · WB 4500 · Tint 10 · ND 2 stops
This is a wide angle shot through the lenses of Bigscreen Beyond. You can see the edges of the lens in the corners. Cameras can never perfectly replicate the human eye, so aliasing, moire, and camera artifacts may appear here that are not present in VR.
Full resolution ↓
Common misconceptions about resolution at 75Hz vs. 90Hz
At 5120×2560 across two 8-bit displays at 90Hz, Bigscreen Beyond requires more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4, display controllers, and MIPI can carry raw. So at 90Hz, Beyond uses Display Stream Compression (DSC), a lossless technique commonly found in gaming monitors. SteamVR first renders content at a user-configurable 3K to 4K per eye, called supersampling. DSC then compresses the signal to 1920×1920 per eye, and a built-in hardware upscaler restores it to 2560×2560 on each display. At 75Hz no compression is needed, and the image is displayed directly at 2560×2560 per eye.
Regardless of refresh rate, Beyond’s displays always operate at their full resolution of 2560×2560 per eye.
The remaining difference between 75Hz and 90Hz is a minor sharpness difference in fine detail such as text. 75Hz mode is best for watching movies or reading, and 90Hz is best for gaming. The photos below compare the two.
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A 100mm macro lens photographing each pixel at 75Hz and 90Hz. Fine details are sharp at both refresh rates; the difference is barely perceivable by the human eye.
The difference in sharpness between 75Hz and 90Hz
The compression and upscaling at 90Hz is primarily noticeable in fine text. Below is a human eye view of a grid of text across the entire field of view of Beyond: the worst case scenario, and the hardest test of 75Hz vs. 90Hz.
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Under the macro lens, the smallest text is slightly sharper at 75Hz. This is the one place the difference shows.