Quick Review - RayNeo GT (non-max)
My new glasses arrived overnight and there don't seem to be a lot of reviews in English so I thought I would share my thoughts here. I'm located in Singapore and ordered the GTs off Aliexpress. My background with these types of glasses is coming from a pair of Xreal ones, back from when they were NReal.
Packing/accessories
Item arrived nicely boxed. It comes with two nose guards, a case, cleaning cloth, some fuzzy anti-friction temple pads and a prescription lens insert example, though this box appeared to be empty in mine.
The case is good. It's hardish and protective, but also not too large.
They don't come with a clip-one screen for the lenses, which I think is a miss and I don't know why they wouldn't include a $2 piece of plastic. The lenses are dark, but not dark enough in bright spaces and I also don't like cranking the screen to maximum brightness. I will either buy a cover or perhaps paint the lenses over with black nail polish.
Comfort, fit, build
First up, the glasses look primo. The plastic has a kind of matte finish, it's rather nice. The arms are solid and have some kind of piano-wireish reinforcement so they can be bent outwards. The two nose pieces are fine. I did have to bend them out considerably to get the whole screen in view, I may try the jawbreaker nose piece.
One thing that arms don't have is vertical up/down adjustments like my old NReals. This is a shame as it's a useful feature for really nailing the positioning. For me, I would have like the angle of the lens to be just slightly further down.
Usb cable is plenty long and flexible, I had no issues there. Buttons are easy to find and depress nicely.
Sound
The speakers are good. They are not super loud, however the sound is clear and nicely balanced. My Nreals sounded like the kind of speaker you'd find in cereal box; you'd basically never want to use them. These speakers are actually very listenable. There is a 'whisper mode' that allegedly quietens the sound. I tried it, but it does alter the sound signature somewhat, so mostly left it alone and stayed with the default.
Screen
I picked GT rather than GT max because the consensus is that birdbath optics are better in terms of clarity, edge-to-edge sharpness and lack of chromatic aberration. I'm glad I did, the screen is great. It is very clear (not *quite* edge to edge, the bottom does get a little blurrier however this might be due to fit). Colours are bright and vivid without looking oversaturated. My Nreals had a tendency to absolutely crush the blacks, these are much more balanced. It's a nice viewing experience - with a couple of extra benefits and caveats I'll talk about in features.
Features
Firstly, I don't read Chinese, so there are menu items I'm not sure what they do, but I did experiment with them all.
- 3DOF stuff - This works great. There are three default modes that are triggered with a single button press on the right arm: stabilised (screen follows you but doesn't move with small jolts and wobbles, very good); pinned (screen stays in one place regardless of where you move your head - this is fantastic, works so good) and no stabilisation. There is no visible image degradation in any of these modes.
- Dolby Vision and HDR - Do not buy these glasses for the HDR/Dolby Vision. It simply doesn't work on any of the devices I tried (laptop, phone, tablet). I think it may only work with the PocketTV. The "AI" HDR is simply horrendous, it's garish and obviously fake and it also introduces an welcome weird blue/magenta colour cast and I feel degrades the quality of the image. The default picture is fine, stick with that.
- Screen resize - this is fantastic, you can set size at 85%, 100%, or 115%. This is helpful for text reading and getting the bottom of the screen in focus, as rescaling to 85% works very well. For a more immersive cinema experience, crank it up to 115%. This and 3DOF are the killer features and why I chose this over air 4s.
- 3D mode - there are buttons and menu items for this. I'm not sure exactly what it's mean to do, but it didn't work at all with any of the content I tried, it turned half my screens off and nothing was 3D, perhaps when the english firmware comes I may be able to understand it more.
- Other features - there are many other menu settings for saturation, colours etc, but I can't read chinese so could only guess what they did. You can experiment and just see what works for you, I had no trouble navigating the menus and experimenting with options, but the features above are the only ones I really needed to play around with and they are easy to understand as an english speaker.
Overall
I'm really happy with these. The screen quality is excellent, and certainly much better than my old nreal. Pinning the screen works great and the sound through the speakers is surprisingly capable. A good buy.