Posted by jedas on March 19th, 2011 |
55 commentsRecently I’ve bought FatShark 2010 Aviator edition video goggles. I’ve been using laptop as my primary navigation screen. I’ve started with EasyCap USB video adapter. It was very cheap (~7$), and very crappy product indeed. Then I’ve switched to Avermedia PCMCIA adapter. It was ok. The mayor problem is laptop screen itself. It’s very difficult to seen even there is moderate sun light outside. Even the laptop is in the dark car trunk, reflections are still very bad.
So I finnaly decided to get these goggles which I’ve heard so much about. Aviator edition is different from standart edition, because it has integrated 2.4Ghz or 5.8 GHz video receiver. Also it came with 100 mW transmitter. I didn’t tested it outside, but I don’t expect much from that power.
I had VR920 video goggles before, so I can compare them. First of all, the things I like:
+ Good field of view (FOV). It’s declared as 40ish degrees. It would be nice to have more, to get even more immersion, but it’s really enought to navigate and feel yourself in the plane. This is where it outperforms VR920.
+ Good contrast. My camera doesn’t produce good colors, so I can’t tell if there colors are good, but picture is quite good.
+ Really good sun shading. Foam around the eyes completely covers everything around, even with the bright sun outside, I’ve seen only screen. No silly caps or covers needed.
I know it’s not a big list, but it’s very important freatures in FPV goggles I think. Now what I didn’t like:
- The most important issue for me with this goggles is eyes fatigue even after very short usage. I must admit my eyes are quite bad, maybe there is something to do with it. But few people with good vision also confirmed this. I think there is something to do with focus distance and eye degree. The goggles are focused for 2 meters virtual distance. But eyes are looking straight forward, parallely into infinitive. Eyes quickly adapts to this and you can see fine in the goggles, but when you take it off, eyes needs to readjust and it feels sick for a few moments. Maybe this is something I need to get used to, but I didn’t like it at all!!!
- Lenses are very close to the eyes. Some people complained about it, personally I had no big problem with that. I guess it was needed to achieve such good FOV.
- Even you can change lenses distance to fit the distance between the eyes with two sliders in the front, it’s almost impossible to get clear picture in the whole screen. Sometimes left, sometimes right, or sometimes both sides are blurry. It’s not very big issue for me, because my osd shows main information near the center of the screen, but other people, could have some problems with osd like dragon OSD. They say that 2010 edition fixed this problem. I wonder how horrible it was before this edition?
- Battery charged came in US mains plug version. I need to buy aditional adapter to use it. I had to cut the cable, fir the T connector and use it with my primary battery charger.
Here are some pictures:
I like this label “inflatable shark not included”.
It’s not easy to take a picture of the view, because you need to be really close to the lens to see the whole picture.
This 100mW transmitter came with simple wire attached instead of antenna. I can live with that if it’s tuned to right frequency. I didn’t tested yet properly, but I’m sure inverted vee antenna will outperform this wire.
I hope this review will help you to decide if you want to purchase this unit. They are not great goggles. They are ok and do their job. Not sure if it’s possible to get anything better for such price though.
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