After a tumultuous initial rollout of the HP Reverb headset marred by stock shortages and display issues, the company says that the issues have been identified and fixed, and that new inventory is bringing the headset back in stock.
HP says that customers can expect to begin finding the Reverb headset back in stock at the company’s site and through official retail partners. Indeed, the Reverb Professional Edition is in stock at the HP US store, while Amazon US shows expected availability of the Reverb Consumer Edition by September 25th. Best Buy, where Reverb was initially available, isn’t yet showing a new listing for the headset.
Speaking to Road to VR, HP says they’ve identified the issues which caused displays on some headsets to flicker, show stripes, or go completely blank in some cases. The root cause of blank screens was the headset’s breakaway cable connector which didn’t maintain a firm connection for some headsets, the company said. Meanwhile, flickering and other display issues were the fault of some internal components not behaving as expected. HP maintains that these issues were the result of manufacturing inconsistencies and a batch of components which had larger tolerances than expected.
The company pulled stock back from retailers while it identified the issues. HP tells Road to VR that all new Reverb inventory available through official retail channels from this point forward has been fully fixed.
While it didn’t go as far as issuing a recall for headsets already sold, the company said that any Reverb owners with issues should contact HP support, and further said that the support teams have been specifically briefed on the Reverb situation. Having run long-term tests on the problematic batch of headsets, HP tells Road to VR that it doesn’t expect currently functional headsets from the initial batch to develop any of the issues in the long run.
A spokesperson for HP’s VR team said the group is “fairly sorry” and “frankly a bit embarrassed” that the initial batch of headsets didn’t meet the quality bar that the company was aiming for. Having identified the issues, and with new procedures in place during manufacturing, the group says that it wants customers to feel confident they are buying a quality product from this point forward.
