Makers Keep Flogging 3D TV, Viewers Keep Shrugging

A Wired article (as carried by CNN) attempts to answer the question of why 3D television hasn't caught on. The reasons listed there (high price, paltry content, the need for 3D glasses for typical sets, headaches and strain) all seem to be on the money, in themselves, but I think don't go far enough. 3D on a set small enough for home use outside a high-end home-theater rig seems to me like a clever novelty that I can't even enjoy unless I've given it my full attention. It's nothing like the jump from black-and-white to color, or even the jump from my old (circa 1993) 19" Trinitron to a flat-panel display. On the big screen, it's another story — there, 3D can be arresting and involving, even when it's exaggerated (and it is). On home sets, even quite large ones, to my eye 3D usually looks phony and out of place. Never mind that the content is limited and often expensive, or that there are competing standards for expensive glasses to wear — I just don't like that the commitment is greater than that required for casual, conventional TV; I can't readily scan email, skim through a magazine, or keep watching out the corner of my eye from another room. (I'm hoping to find some actually watchable no-glasses 3D sets at CES next week, but I'm skeptical.)

Comments

scam

[arnodf]

3D tv is just a scam. tried every 20-30 years and they just don't learn...

Re:scam

[tripleevenfall]

I have been thinking this was the main issue. How will an expensive 3D TV set improve most of my TV watching? It won't really enhance news, informational, sitcom kinds of shows. Some dramas and movies, perhaps. Sports and action-type programming, sure.

I think most people shrug at 3DTV because, who needs it?

Especially as expensive as it currently is, and since most cable operators are probably going to charge extra for it (and most are already paying extra for HD capability). This isn't a boom time, economically speaking, to be asking people to upgrade all their equipment.

I don't think most people see the benefits as being worth the expense.

Re:scam

[pixelpusher220]

I saw Avatar in 3D and literally didn't see anything useful in using that medium over regular 2D. I would assume they pulled out most of the stops on something that big to make 3D work.

Perhaps when it evolves into something that is 'actually' 3D and not 'simulated' 3D they will have something, but until then it is not and never has been '3D'. You can't change your perspective to look at an object from a different direction like you can in actual 3D life.

Re:scam

[jedidiah]

> Are we to understand you did not see the extravaganza, which was Avatar?

One movie? Is that all. There have been tons of movies recently released in 3D. The fact that people find it necessary to fixate on a particular movie doesn't say anything positive for the format.

So am I supposed to replace all of my equipment and deal with those stupid glasses over ONE movie?

Sounds pretty stupid.

No wonder 3D uptake is not so hot.

3D is more often than not annoying or irrelevant.

Err

[Anonymous Coward]

3D TV didnt catch on because its pathetic bling. Its flashy crap to hide the fact they didn't bother to hire writers or decent actors.
Making things louder & flashier is NOT better.

Re:Err

[Lord Apathy]

It is not catching on because makers haven't figure it out yet. Here is the deal. Most people that watch tv donâ(TM)t' want a interactive experience. They don't want to strap on crappy do-dads or watch complex things where they have to pick and choose a path or answer questions.

People sit down in front of a tv to be mindlessly entertained. Something a standard 2d tv does just fine.

You want a interactive video experience play your Xbox. Want to be educated, read a book.

I will never adopt 3D

[metalgamer84]

I hate having to wear glasses just to watch something. More so, it looks and feels like a gimmick.

Re:I will never adopt 3D

[jelwell]

I hate having to wear glasses just to watch something. More so, it looks and feels like a gimmick.

Can you imagine if you had to wear glasses every minute of your waking life? Those people with bad eyesight must think the whole world is a gimmick!
Joseph Elwell.

No thanks

[msobkow]

Pay a premium for a TV that requires special glasses, which as mine are prescription, means not settling for what's on the market, but waiting for someone to produce prescription lens 3D glasses for that particular model and paying an arm and a leg for them.

After waiting for those non-existent glasses to be developed, paying hundreds or thousands of dollars extra, what will I have?

A TV that gives me a migraine.

No thanks.

Re:Why?

[wisty]

I like 3D for some stuff. Crowd scenes and other chaotic stuff can look great on it. Big cars exploding out of the screen is just trashy, though. There's some beautiful underwater documentary I saw - swarms of hammerheads swimming past in 3D is very very cool.

The thing is, people know that the price will drop, the glasses will become lighter (and probably incompatible with old 3D TVs), and the new ones won't give you headaches. There's only a few good 3D movies every year, and you can see them in cinemas.

When I was young, my parents only had a black and white set (because they were tight, and hated TV). I used to think color TV looked crap. Suddenly, there were color clashes everywhere. But I got used to it after a while.

3D is nothing to be excited about now, though.

Re:It's the old catch-22

[Baloroth]

Consumers will flock to 3DTVs when there is basically nothing else on the market: otherwise, it just doesn't provide enough benefit to justify the added cost. This happened with HD too; did the TV makers really expect it to be different this time?

I think they might have. HD TVs sold in droves, for a while anyways, as people upgraded. They were a significant upgrade, and prices dropped while quality increased rapidly, causing a huge bubble for TV makers. It wasn't even that nothing else was available: HD TV's are simply far better than old CRT TVs, in nearly every possible way. 3D TVs are almost worse, in 3D mode, than regular HD TVs (although usually slightly better in non-3D mode), which means they simply will not sell. But based on the bubble, TV makers expected them to. Basically, they expected (or hoped, anyways) sales to continue at what they were, using 3D TVs to push that, not realizing they were in the middle of an upgrade bubble. Similar story with Blu-ray: DVDs were far (far far far) superior to VHS, so they sold well, whereas most people can't tell the difference between an upscaled DVD and a Blu-ray disc.

3d is not important

[roc97007]

HDTV was a reasonable improvement on NTSC and PAL. 3D really isn't. Compare to: DVD was a huge improvement over VHS. Blu-ray isn't enough of an improvement over DVD to be interesting.

Re:3d is not important

[roc97007]

Caveat; I've been a video geek since the early eighties.

There is no contradiction.

NTSC was not good enough. It was interlaced, had poor resolution, and was the wrong aspect ratio. "Letterboxing" the content, of which I was a big fan at the time, (because seeing the entire frame was more important) admittedly reduced the (vertical) resolution even further. Some say part of the problem was also the analog nature of the signal (as opposed to HDTV being digital) and there is some truth to that, but I personally think the term "digital" is way overused. [1]

HDTV was non-interlaced [2], had resolution that was good enough (take note, we'll come back to that later) and was closer to the aspect ratio used in theaters. (In that 1.85:1 would have a tiny bit of zoom or letterboxing, and 2.39:1 would still be acceptable.)

Now, VHS was a horrible medium, that didn't even come close to the resolution of the better TVs of the time. (Can you imagine today watching content in 170 horizontal line resolution?) Laserdisc (of which I was a consumer) came closer. DVD represented a huge, easily visible increase in quality over VHS. (Moreover, a well-crafted DVD on a good player was visibly better than even the best Criterion laserdisc on a good player, without all the disadvantages of laserdisc.)

So if you go strictly nerd-like by the numbers only, the resolution of vhs (170 lines) is about the same fraction of NTSC (525 lines) as DVD (480P) is of HDTV (1080P). So DVD must be just horrible on HDTVs, right? In real life it's not that simple, for a few reasons:

(1) As we do not change out our eyeballs with every upgrade, at some point, the video quality is good enough. The difference between VHS and a well crafted 480P DVD is striking. Even your grandparents notice it. But the difference between 480P and Blu-ray? Shrug. The difference in detail can be noticeable, but it's just not striking. For most people, 480P is good enough. 720P is an embarrassment of riches. 1080P is overkill. [3] (Note I didn't include any interlaced modes. I hope interlace goes away and never ever comes back.)

(2) The reason I keep saying "well crafted" is that it's an important issue in and of itself. I was an early adopter of Blu-ray as a backup medium, but since I had one in my media center I could also use it to play Blu-ray discs on the TV (Sony 48 inch Bravia). What I found was that there is a considerable overlap between the best DVDs and the worst Blu-rays. As one would expect, as it takes more than a medium to craft a brilliant video. Buying a title on Blu-ray is not, in and of itself, a guarantee that you're getting better video quality.

(3) Screen size is important. In less than 50 inches, the difference between DVD and Blu-ray is insignificant. Up to 60 inches it becomes noticeable, and at 100 inches or larger (projection) Blu-ray is required, as DVD just doesn't hack it at that screen size. Now, it used to be that the bigger screen you had the better, right? People were putting 60 inch sets in rooms way too small, and forcing themselves to sit way too close to get a good viewing experience, but hey, it's BIG. And big is BETTER. However, I've read lately that there is some reversal in this trend, and now 32 inches is considered a good size because it's GREEN. And green is BETTER. Shrug. The point is, unless you have a viewing room big enough and a screen big enough and every single component in the video stream is good enough, you're wasting your money. Sorry, it's true. We can make ourselves believe we're having a better experience, but really we're not, except in our imaginations.

And so, for most people in most situations with most equipment, Blu-ray just doesn't buy you enough to warrant paying more. Once it's dead even and Blu-ray players are $39 and there's a huge pile of discs in the cut-out bin (and by that I don't mean "Ernest saves Christmas") I might consider it when the current DVD player fails and can't be fixed. But it's ju

It's not 3D

[hawguy]

I think the problem is that 3D movies and TV are not really "3D", they are 2D movies using a stereoscopic effect that can fool the brain into thinking that the picture has depth. But it's not really 3D, which results in headaches and other effects that make it uncomfortable for many people.

If they could come out with a holoscopic projection mechanism that shows true 3D, maybe then people will be more interested, but high quality full-color holoscopic projection is probably decades away, if ever.

Even in a galaxy far, far away, the holographic projections created by R2-series droids have flickering low-quality images.

Re:It's the old catch-22

[gfxguy]

I don't think that's really it, though. From a simple "quality" point of view, there's no reason not to have a 3D TV - you can watch 2D with just as much quality and still have the option for an occasional 3D experience... it's choice, and it's win-win.

The problem for me is that finally going from SD to HD cost a lot of money. I had to upgrade the TV, I had to upgrade the disc player to BluRay, I had to upgrade the DVR, I had to upgrade the service I was getting.... now I'm supposed to upgrade all those devices to 3D? I don't think so... the cost isn't worth the benefit. I suppose if I was still at SD and decided to upgrade now, I'd go straight to 3D, but that's not the case for me nor the vast majority of people, IMO.

I expect when I spend that much money on a television that it last more than 2 or 3 years... more like 10 (at least) or more. Both televisions I replaced were over 12 years old. I need a REALLY compelling reason to upgrade, and there just isn't one.

Re:Not much better than it was before

[Beardo the Bearded]

At the end of the day I guess it's just like at the cinema, Avatar was phenomenal in 3D but little else has been, likewise, it appears games are suited to 3D too.

Pop quiz, hotshot:
1. Who was Luke's mentor in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi?
2. Who was the character in The Lord of the Rings that chased "his precious"?
3. Name the blue girl in Avatar.

3D doesn't make for good, memorable characters. It makes for gimmicky crap. Avatar was a terrible movie with a 3D effect, 2D characters, and a 1D plot.

Re:It's the old catch-22

[demonbug]

Consumers will flock to 3DTVs when there is basically nothing else on the market: otherwise, it just doesn't provide enough benefit to justify the added cost. This happened with HD too; did the TV makers really expect it to be different this time?

I agree that 3DTV uptake will basically be increasing only as people's current sets wear out and they buy new ones, I really don't see it being a driver of sales. That said, at least for the active-shutter type of 3D it really doesn't add any cost to include it in the TV - it is basically just a timing signal to tell the (over-priced) glasses when to switch.

That said, I don't think the manufacturers really expected it to push sales. They hoped it would help, and they didn't really have much else to advertise to try to attract new buyers (new! now 0.01 inches thinner than last year! Now including streaming app w in addition to x, y, and z!), so they have been talking it up as the big new feature. Tech/consumer electronics sites have been playing along, for pretty much the same reason - something to talk about and drive views. Not too much fun to only be able to say, "well, this year's models continue the trend of sacrificing picture quality for tiny and meaningless reductions in thickness as manufacturers abandon full-array LED backlighting in favor of more cost-effective edge lighting."

Re:It's the old catch-22

[Baloroth]

IMO it had more to do with the price dropping (a lot). I worked at retail a few years back (starting in 2006 when you could still find a few CRT TVs) that sold HD TVs: the price dropped rapidly. A 60" TV used to be multiple thousands of dollars. Now you can get one for a little over a thousand dollars. I actually think that is why SD models were dropped: because LCD prices came down. 10 years ago a 19" LCD monitor was a thousand dollars or so. Now it is under $100. SD TVs didn't cease to be made because TV makers forced people to upgrade: they stopped being made because no one was buying them anymore, because they could get so much better for not much more.

Sports worst feature of 3D Re:scam

[AJ Mexico]

Actually,sports is the worst programming for 3D. For previous technology advances, sports was obviously better. Sports looked great in color, and sports looked great in Hi-Def and that helped those technologies gain acceptance. Not so for sports in 3D. 3D works best when the "director" can carefully control the strength of the 3d effect, and keep it consistent throughout, as is done in (well-made) movies, and in video games, where everything can be calculated in advance. I watched one of the first (US) football games broadcast to theaters in 3D. It was a painful experience.

While watching 3D, you can gradually get accustomed to the infra-ocular distance used to film the scene, which may differ from your view of the natural world. When adjacent scenes use different camera configurations, your mind takes time to make the adjustment to the new 3D perspective. This is one of the contributors to the headache effect.

In sports, the action is unpredictable, and may move towards or away from the camera(s) unexpectedly. Cuts from one view to another are frequent. This causes the viewer to continually readjust to new 3d perspectives. IMHO, this problem is the unavoidable Achilles heel of 3d sports. Remember, this is technology-independent. It doesn't matter what kind of glasses are being used, or whether no glasses are used -- this problem still exists.

Porn?

[witherstaff]

Some tv manufacturer needs to get the porn industry behind them - it helped VHS win the format war with Betamax.