KITAAAAAA

Alright, so a few relatively surprising thoughts on this that I didn't expect after reading so much about it.
But first, I am an experienced VR user who has tried Vive, Rift CV1, PSVR, and Quest. So I know what I'm looking at. 

The thing that surprised me the most was how much better the lenses were than the Quest, yes not just CV1, but also Quest. I had read a few, but not many comparisons online from people who owned both that the Rift S had less god rays and a larger sweet spot than Quest, and I can say that that is definitely, without a doubt, true. They're still there, but it's immediately noticeable that the Rift S just has so little god rays, while the Quest feels more like the CV1's lenses but a bit better. Rift S's lenses feel significantly better than CV1's, and maybe 30% better than Quest's. So Quest to me feels like a 20% improvement over the CV1, while Rift S is like a 50% improvement. 

Resolution, too, felt like the same kind of improvement over the Quest. Quest still felt like it had SDE similar to CV1, but a bit better. Rift S is significantly better over CV1, to the point where it's mostly invisible for a much wider range of textures. The sharpness, with supersampling, was just so good, it felt like I actually had better depth perception. Quest didn't really feel like that kind of an improvement over CV1. Again, it was only just a bit better.

However, problems that I didn't see many others talk about, which perhaps might also just be with my unit, is that the head tracking seems to be overly predictive, resulting in a less stable horizon than all other headsets I've tried. And the other problem is that there is a subtle, ephemeral (like half a second) appearance of a horizontal scanline pattern at random times, similar to the Index issue. 

That's it for surprises. My impressions otherwise are consistent with what most others usually talk about. Probably the best headset I've used so far despite the two additional issues I had.