I feel that the bare minimum headset that can handle work is the HP Reverb G2. It’s the only headset with a high enough resolution under $1000 (you can find it under $300 on eBay). There’s also Pimax, but their QA and customer support is terrible and you need to deal with base stations.
Through the lens comparison g2 vs Index vs Quest 2
I have a reverb g2 - great for games but definitely not up to it for work - the sweet spot is just too small.
If looking at a page of text, only the middle of 3 or 4 lines of text are in perfect focus. The rest might be readable but blurry. You have to move your head to scan lines comfortably and that is far from acceptable. I tried all the tricks to increase the size of the sweetspot to little avail.
The Quest 2 and the Reverb look closer than I expected. The contrast is the main difference (and that could be an artifact of the way it's shot)
The tracking on the Reverb has a bad reputation and I've avoided it for that reason mainly - as well as the extra complexity resulting from using one more translation layer (Windows MR > SteamVR) and a minority platoform.
The headset tracking for the Reverb is pretty good, it's mostly the controller tracking that has issues.
But the WindowsMR layer is a bit annoying. It's not too common but I've had a Windows update prevent it from working until I did a full uninstall/reinstall of the Windows Mixed Reality software, the Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR software, and SteamVR. Also because it uses different controllers, sometimes (though very rarely) an app will not recognize the controllers or certain buttons on them.
Oculus and SteamVR are pretty far ahead of the pack - the Quest is the biggest market and SteamVR is the most open ecosystem, and the rest of the APIs get comparatively little (or imbalanced) real-world testing and improvement.
Reverb is cool but at the end of the day, despite some good Valve engineering, it's WMR, and HP doesn't seem super committed to VR anyways.
Through the lens comparison g2 vs Index vs Quest 2
https://youtu.be/ny_OPsxHQmU