PC Magazine Reviews Sharp's 3D Notebook

Moochman writes "I recently discovered this article over at PC Magazine, an excellent and fairly complete review of the Sharp RD3D, aka the 'world's first 3D laptop' (see previous Slashdot coverage here). In addition to rating performance, features, etc, it provides a nice little explanation and diagram of how the no-glasses 3D technology works, and discusses possible eye-strain issues. The biggest disappointment is that even the included 3D games still don't work right." Moochman provides a link to Sharp's information site, too.

Comments

Ah yes

[The Cat]

Good old PC Magazine, where if you don't have a 27" monitor, your computer system is worthless. Sometimes having all that free evaluation hardware and top-of-the-line enterprise-class software causes a reality-free zone where everyone spends $18,000 a year on brightly colored new icons to click.

Quite surprising they didn't use the word "clunky" at least once.

3D my ass.

[SharpFang]

First off, every laptop is 3D. As long as they don't make it into flat sheets of paper, they have width, height and depth. And then referring to flat screen as 3D... Yeah, mod me down as flamebait/troll, the fact that you see 2 separate images with 2 eyes doesn't make it 3D. You can't look behind it, you can't just tilt your head to see it from different angle, and if you try, you lose all the '3d' effect.

I remember one SCI-FI book where they had a really 3D computer. A small medallion with one button, that upon pressing the button displays a holographic interface - and senses user's interaction with it. And the display is fully holo=3D too.
But that's a far future, and now anything that cheats your brain into seeing depth being called 3D is considered a good marketing technique.

Re:3D my ass.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

[shrug] 2.5D, maybe?

I mean, fine, it's not true 3D. But it's still a hell of an advance in display technology. True, open-air, walk-around 3D projection would be very very cool, but for most of the applications that people want 3D display for right now, this is a big step in the right direction.

Obviously there's plenty of room for improvement. You should be able to "tilt your head to see it from different angle," I agree. I'd say a reasonable standard is that the illusion of depth should be maintainable anywhere from 1 to 3 feet away from the screen, and with the viewer's head positioned directly in front of any part of the screen including the edges. If they can get that down ... well, as far as I'm concerned, they've pulled off a miracle.

Stereo, not 3D.

[iantri]

This only provides stereo images, not 3D.

It still sounds kind of cool though, but this sort of thing is doable on regular hardware with red/blue or LCD shutter glasses, or just doing the eye-crossing thing.

Unfortunately, it costs a hell of a lot of money for something that looks as good or better with $1.50 anaglyph (red/blue) glasses.

Re:Why 3D displays ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same argument suggests that a black and white display is as good as a color display, "besides the coolness factor," since you could always display three monochrome color separations. In fact, the human vision system is specialized to process information more efficiently if it is presented in certain ways, and stereoscopic 3D systems (mostly shutter goggles in my experience) find wide use in business contexts such as protein folding research.

checked those out at Telecom'2003 in Geneva: nice

[Lol the unbeliever]

I saw those in October: Sharp had a big booth, with these screeens on all the form factors. Altogether Very Nice, but I noticed that these screens are better on handhelds than on laptops, as positioning the screen to your eyes in the *right* (ie fiddly) way is natural with a handheld, but requires neck movemement with a laptop