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Hot Or Not — 3D TV
Several sources have written to tell us that in terms of hype at this year's CES show, there is none bigger than that surrounding 3D TV. Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, LG, and Toshiba all have their own flavors of hardware and ESPN announced a 3D sports channel, but Microsoft seems to be bucking the trend with their apparent lack of 3D interest surrounding the Xbox product. "We're yet to see any major brand at CES pushing a 3D TV that doesn't require them. In most cases these aren't the basic Ray Ban style you might have worn to watch Avatar. In many cases they'll actually require power. For example, Sony's 3D TVs use a 'frame sequential' display method, which involves active-shutter glasses that turn on and off in sync with the images. Some TVs come with the glasses and have the transmitter built in, but again, in some cases you'll need to buy the transmitter and glasses separately."
Just doesn't work... It's headache inducing and problematic with multiple viewers and viewing angles.
Don't expect it anytime soon in a practical and usable form.
3D circularly polarized projectors are probably the best usable tech as the glasses are cheap. However high refresh rate LCDs with active shutter glasses are probably the best tech for PCs.
I don't understand.... Isn't that the whole point?
Sincerely,
PHBs at Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, LG, and Toshiba
When watching 3D movies, I tend to go cross-eyed and get a headache very quickly. I think it's because everything I'm seeing is on the same focal plane, but my eyes attempt to adjust for parallax based on different apparent distances of objects. I had to walk out of Avatar 3D after about 10 minutes, I just could not watch it like that. Does anyone else experience this?
We just got two 3D monitors from Hyundai, one smaller one that goes in the production area, and a huge one to show to clients. The networks, especially the ones that generate a lot of their own content, are scrambling for 3D content... not necessarily because they want to push it, but because everyone is scared to be left behind.
The Hyundai monitors use passive glasses, and the image is quite good. I can see 3D, especially with passive glasses (where you can buy replacements or extras for reasonable prices), really taking off.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
Who wants to wear an extra pair of glasses just to watch TV?
This whole 3D video thing smacks of a industry money grab disguised as a fad...
Exec: "Well everyone and their gramma has a 'flatscreen' jumbotron at home, what do we do now?"
R&D: "Gentlemen, we've reached the limits of this plane of entertainment, we must go to the next dimension"
*dramatic music*
crazy dynamite monkey
I just don't see the benefit in 3D TV. I know the technology is getting better, but the 3D in Avatar was just good enough to not be a distraction from the movie- it certainly didn't add anything to it, besides $5 for the ticket. The point is that for most of the movie, I did not perceive anything different than a normal movie, and those moments when I did were distracting and jarring. I have seen a couple imax movies in 3D and I think I tend to mentally flatten the images- except for the parts where the snake jumps out at you, which is just distracting and cheesy.
So, if I'm going to be mentally flattening the images anyway, why bother?
What do active glasses give you that polarity glasses wouldn't? Why go that road except to eek out a bit more cash from the consumer?
It's technically feasible to build a consumer television that alternates the left/right eye images, frame by frame, in sync with alternate blanking on glasses. All you need is a LCD with a good enough refresh rate and the right electronics.
To use polarising glasses requires a large exotic projector, the space to set it up (think 'theatre' not 'living room') and a massively expensive reflective screen (AFAIK, anyway). Thats why.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
We finally get a display technology with zero flicker, the LCD, and the 3D crowd has to put it back. Yuck.
It's like those 38-DDDs are right in your face!
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
How do you polarize the image from a conventional LCD without significantly reducing contrast ratios and brightness during non 3D viewing?
I've used 3D shutter glasses for my PC that work with nVidia drivers/cards for well over a decade. Any 3D game can render this way... the tech works okay, but nowhere near as lovely or convenient as the Captain EO / Avatar method which uses polarized projection and unpowered polarized glasses... and 3D eyeglass-free monitors that use parallax have existed for about a decade as well now... None of the new TVs do this? You can add field-sequential, shutter-frame tech to your PC and a good CRT for under $50... for the last decade. Fun for immersion... a bit of an impediment for high accuracy things like sniping in a FPS though.
Mostly it is due to the glasses and the effect the glasses have on the wearer.
Having recently seen my first 3D movie at a theater last night, I can say that yes it does look incredible, but I have significant eye strain, that is still bothering me the next day.
Others I have talked to said they get headaches from the 3D glasses, others just hate having to wear them due to comfort, interfering with their normal glasses or not used to wearing glasses..
Sorry, no one I have talked to is willing to veg out for an hour or 2 in the evenings with 3D glasses on.
I am really not willing to do it for games either. I'd rather have a few hours gaming in 2D, than a short duration with headaches in 3D.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
It happens to me too and it doesn't go away after 10 minutes as other commenter posted. I watched Avatar 2D and headache-free.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Really, if your 3D TV requires powered glasses in order to experience 3D viewing, why not just get rid of the TV altogether and simply display slightly offset images on each lens of a pair of glasses? I doubt that cost would be an issue seeing as how video glasses seem to be available for under $200 (it would take a lot of people viewing to overcome the cost of the 3D TV + TV glasses). It obviously can't be related to a communal viewing experience as everyone viewing the 3D TV will need glasses anyway.
At least with polarized glasses the power requirement is gone but still, since some form of eyewear is required anyway, why not just get rid of the TV altogether? Is it just because you'll still be able to watch 2D without the glasses?
Don't get me wrong, the prospects look interesting, but it just seems like holding onto the TV for no other purpose than being able to manufacture large and expensive displays.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
An article on Sony and "betting it all" on 3D TVs was published in the Wall Street Journal, yesterday. A pretty detailed article, imo.
Basically, that article pointed out the fatal flaw:
The challenge for Sony and the other electronics makers: persuading people to adopt 3-D so quickly after hundreds of millions of households just made the transition to high-definition video. Consumers will have to buy brand new televisions, which, according to some estimates, could cost between 10% and 20% more than the high-definition TVs currently on the market.
Not going to happen. People are going to resist this like mad. "New TV? I just bought a new HDTV, and now you want me to go buy a new one so soon which is more expensive? Yeah, go fuck yourselves."
Inflammatory rhetoric aside, what I found most interesting, though, is that CEO Stringer appears to be his push (at least in this arena) against the "Not invented here" bias that is apparently so prevalent at Sony. Most slashdotters will agree--we don't need more proprietary, incompatible Sony formats. Hopefully this attitude is promoted outside the 3D TV realm.
Oh, you have a girlfriend. Are you going to get married?
Do you love her?
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Polarized glasses leak like hell unless you sit in exactly the right spot and look exactly the right direction - or at least they did last time I tried them.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Nvidia is adding support for 3D video/Blu-Ray for all of their GT200/300 video cards via drivers. Yes you do need a 120hz+ display, however a lot of TVs don't do true 120Hz but simply interpolate a 60Hz image twice every frame to achieve "120Hz."
it certainly didn't add anything to it, besides $5 for the ticket.
Active glasses are old tech. I saw them demoed about 14 years ago - worked okay, a little distracting. But it wasn't at CES, it was Comdex. Well, okay, it was actually Adultdex, an "adult industry" tech/trade show that occurred at the Sahara during Comdex.
Pron really pushed the tech envelope back then....
I found, when watching Avatar, that it was important to look where the director wants you to look. Real cameras have real focal distances, so you can't look wherever you want and expect to be able to get everything in focus. Up was an easier viewing experience, but with a less extreme 3D effect.
Insert self-referential sig here.
At least credit xkcd when you rip-off its comments: http://xkcd.com/684/
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There are technologies that allow you to do polarized 3D from an LCD display such as that used in the iZ3D monitors.
My brain IS medically incapable of 3D. I suffer from a condition called amblyopia and therefore can rarely percieve any 3D effect no matter the technology; to be honnest I probably don't see the real world in 3D either. However, for some reason, I have rather good depth perception, probably adapted over the years since I suffer from amblyopia since I was born. So I'm also part of the group that is totally indifferent to all this 3D hype beside the fact that I fear overall image quality might go down because people will put effort in the 3D.
30 years ago, you could hardly buy a television that wasn't a CRT, and if you wanted something over 30", you had to be very prepared to bust out your wallet. Today, a 30" LCD costs $750 (or whatever, I'm probably within $250, which is fine when you consider that the 30 year old television probably cost $2,500, and those numbers don't bother to account for inflation).
You are delusional.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There are technologies that allow you to do polarized 3D from an LCD display such as that used in the iZ3D monitors.
Now that is interesting, I didn't know that...
Just been looking at a description of the technology here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/monitors/display/iz3d.html
The fact remains though that active glasses allow the use of a 'normal' LCD panel as a display though. Will one system win out, or will there remain a variety of technologies? Time will tell.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
For those who may not understand all LCD images are polarized. Try turning your head sideways with polarizing sunglasses on while looking at a conventional LCD display (from a gas pump to your radio to the TV).
LCDs are a polarized light technology.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
LCDs themselves are switchable polarizing filters, so all you need to do is stack 2 LCD panels on top of each other. That way you can have one that does color and one that changes the angle of polarization.
In fact, that's exactly how the iZ3D monitors work.
Red and Green aren't the same, they are chemically different and the prices of the consumables can affect the cost of each color.
You're delusional if you think TVs haven't changed radically in the past 30 years...
30 years ago you were lucky to have a display capable of 640x480 which is .3MP... Today you can buy a 1080p 2M display, that's a nearly 7x increase in resolution.
You are also highly delusional if you think price has remained consistent with inflation... I purchased my 30" 1920x1200 display for $350... In 1990 dollars that would be $215... You are insane if you think you could purchase a 2MP 30" Display for $215 in 1990.
Yeah, keep whining. I'll be miserably playing 3d video games on a daily basis. It's painful, but I keep doing it. Progress sure does suck, huh?
More expensive yes, but the glasses are cheaper and a much easier sell if they're passive.
As to the second point, you can change the polarization at a pixel level. Because of this, you can display two images simultaneously and avoid flickering completely.
The iZ3D monitors vary the polarization per pixel so a particular pixel can be seen more or less by each eye - so you have a single brightness (per color element per pixel). This gives you the full resolution, but gives you a ghosting effect as pixels can bleed into each other and has problems with angle changes.
The Hyundai monitors use a cheaper/simpler system that only does filtering by rows, similar to an interlaced TV signal. This means you get effective half horizontal resolution.
The other way to do polarization with LCD is Hyundai's way. They use filters per row so you get half vertical resolution 3D per eye, kind of like an interlaced TV signal.
This seems to have the potential to be a lot easier and cheaper manufacturing process. Not only that if you can get LCD panels (or indeed any flat panel display technology) that has twice 1080P resolution in one or both dimensions, there are suddenly very few draw backs as there is no flickering (like shutter glasses), no ghosting (like iZ3D) and no loss of resolution.
I mean, effective half vertical resolution.
You said:
Go look at a specific size and/or brand of TV for the last 30 years. Go watch how little has actually changed. like I said, small resolution leaps, and such. Meanwhile, the price has remained very consistent with inflation regardless of things being cheaper to produce. Oh you will notice one thing though. The TV's actually got smaller when switched from a standard measurement to widescreen.
Meanwhile, over here in reality, prices have fallen in nominal dollars, plummeted in inflation adjusted dollars, and resolution has increased more than 4 fold (that's spatially). Sure, those things aren't as true in the 20" TV space, but no one cares, 35" TVs have become quite affordable.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I totally agree that active shutter glasses are a hard sell, and I don't think there is any way they will become mainstream in the living room... but the cost to manufacture a polarized LCD display for a large screen TV is WAY more than the cost to make a couple active shutter glasses (and glasses don't even have to affect the TV margin much, since they could be sold separately after including 1-2 with the TV, just like game console controllers).
This is especially true given that the hardware changes for the display with active shutters is fairly trivial - just take an existing TV/panel that can do 480Hz, add a cheap RF transmitter, and the rest is firmware/software. That's why these TVs are coming out so quickly, potentially in whatever size the manufacturers already have.
30 years ago you were lucky to have a display capable of 640x480 which is .3MP
There are two ways to think about this. In 1980, most personal computers had very low resolutions. The Apple II, for instance, had a resolution of 280×192 in HiRes mode. The IBM PC came out later (and even then, its graphics capabilities were nothing to write home about).
But if you had a graphics workstation, dual 1280 x 1280 displays were available. Of course, such a system might have cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Are you implying in your example that they didn't improve the antenna? {...} You know what's happened with electronics over the past 20 years? They've improved tremendously.
I think the parent is trying to say, that although constant "improvement" are happening, none of these was called for in the first place.
The new antenna is better that the older, but older one already did pretty well the job.
Lots of these improvement are only solutions trying to find a non-existing problem to fix. They are used by the marketing department, so they have something to present as "new" on their product line and sell at an increased price. Otherwise we would all still use the same technology from 5 years ago - it was already good enough back then and 5 years later the prices would have dropped dramatically. There's a conflict of interests between consumers who look for something "good enough" and constructors which are looking for pretext to continue selling their equipment at the same price (...but this one has the "brand new" XyZ gizmo !)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'd pay $2500 for a good CRT.
It's the best display technology available to man.
I hear ya. It would go great with my Commodore 64 - the best computing platform available to man!
porn has neer pushed tech. Pornographers just grab any media type and put porn on it. People don't remember the failure, only success. SO in hindsight it appears as if they are a driving force in tech. They are not,and never have been.
Everymedia that has failed has ahd porn on it, every one that was a success , has porn on it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nice visualization of circular polarization:
http://www.rkm3d.com/How-3D-Works/3D-circular-polarization-explained.html