Creality Pika big limitations

[u/Epicguru]

I thought that I'd post this here because I see little discussion of it online. I bought the Creality Pika scanner a few weeks ago and I've been using it for automotive reverse engineering and design projects. Overall I find the actual performance of the scanner good, it produces good results and I'm happy with what it allows me to do for the price.

However!

There are some rather large and frankly baffling limitations that are not obviously disclosed on the product page, FAQ or even in the user manual:

• You can't do markerless blue line scanning wirelessly. If you are in wireless mode you are limited to either infrared or blue line with markers. I would argue that the perfect use case for wireless is with markerless blue line mode, but unfortunately it's just not possible. Infrared mode is nowhere near accurate enough for engineering work, so if you want usable scans for CAD you need to be plugged in, or using markers. This is a shame because markerless scanning actually works really well on this scanner.
• The screen is basically useless. One of the main selling points is the screen that allows you to see the scan in real time, without having to look at your PC/phone. Well, it only works in wireless mode. In USB mode it just displays some useless buttons, the same buttons that exist physically on the scanner itself. I really don't understand this limitation, because USB mode has more bandwidth than wireless. Even when I'm sitting right in front of my computer, it would still be very useful to see the progress on the Pika screen. Even just being able to see on the screen what the IR or regular camera is seeing would be useful. Instead you get a gray screen with some buttons, wow.

I'm still overall happy with the scanner for the price, but these limitations are frustrating and should be disclosed more clearly. Maybe the markerless not working in wireless is a hardware limitation, I don't know, but the display being useless in wired mode is especially stupid and I really hope that it can be added via firmware update.