ITV Goggles?

[srfnmnk]

Anyone have any experience flying FPV with ITV goggles? My thought is...I travel quite a bit and if I buy these goggles, I just may get use out of them other than...JUST FPV. It's really hard for me to justify a few hundred dollars on FPV goggles, but if I can use them to watch movies and what not on a long flight in HD...pretty valuable.

If you don't have experience with ITV but you're an experienced FPV pilot, could you share your thoughts on these goggles?

Thanks!

http://itvgoggles.com/products/

 

[TehMaxwell]

I wouldn't call myself an experienced FPV Pilot but I may as well give my thoughts anyways...

As far as I can tell these should work with a separate video receiver, as they have an AV input port, this dukes mean however that you will need to build a ground station to house your FPV receiver and the batteries that power it. For this application it wouldn't be to big, but you will still be carrying around something a lot larger that the goggles from Fatshark, etc. By going down this route you would be loosing the lovely compact design of goggles that have everything built in. So setup at the flying field may take longer and be much more hassle than the Fatshark goggles, etc.

Then there is the main issue I can see, from what it looks like these goggles have no eye cups or other attachment to block out the sunlight. This is not a fault with the design, as FPV may not have been the thing in mind when these were designed. This may cause you problems on a sunny day, as you may not be able to see the screen due to the reflection of the sunlight.

Also I cannot say for certain but if you wanted to upgrade to an OSD or even when just flying bare FPV, you may not be able to see the little details. This may not seem so bad but trust me, those posts and poles are like magnets and if your goggles don't show good enough detail you probably won't see it until it is too late.

Then finally, there is the price. At $399.99 or more for a good pair, you may as well buy some proper FPV goggles. As at that price you would be getting so much more "bang for the buck" and you would have something that would grow with you into things like head tracking with pan and tilt (with the attitude SD goggles for example, the ones that Flitetest use).

I know this is long but I want to make sure I help you the best I can!

My honest opinion?

Buy a good pair of dedicated FPV goggles and get a portable media player or download videos onto a tablet or notebook you may have. In the long run this will probably be much more cost effective.

However this is just my opinion, don't take it as law and get some other peoples as well.

 

[jhitesma]

They do have a page touting them as suitable for FPV: http://itvgoggles.com/itvgoggles-for-uavs-and-drones/

The lack of an integrated ground station isn't that big of a deal IMHO. I went with the fat shark base which don't have an integrated RX partly because they have slightly better specs than the predators at a lower price...but mainly because I eventually plan on going to 1.2/1.3ghz and built in RX's aren't available. So I figured why waste the money/weight on my head of an integrated RX I won't be using in the future. And so far I've been very happy with the fat shark base goggles and the FOV they give.

The cheapest iTV's have 320x240 resolution which is the same as the FatShark Teleporters - and less than ideal but OK.

The next step up is 640x480 which is the same as FatSharks other than the new DominatorHD's which are 800x600 so I'd say resolution isn't really an issue unless you go with the cheapest iTV's where it's still no worse than the bottom end FatSharks.

The "Wideview" iTV's do see to be considerably lower resolution than the others though - only 432*240 - so I'd stay away from them for FPV.

And none of them seem to have as much immersion as "FPV Goggles" - but that could always be remedied with some foam or other modifications.


BUT...don't forget you can turn this around as well. Pretty much all "FPV Goggles" can accept external signals just fine even if they have a built in RX. They're only component so HDMI won't work but almost everything has component video out so you should be able to make do...and if not there are always converters. That's how you hook up a standalone ground station and video is video whether it comes from a live RX or from a recorded source. So you can always use FPV goggles to watch other sources...but most FPV goggles are "only" 640x480 resolution which isn't that great when you're used to HD tv!