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  • HDBanger - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    No one is buying the 3d fad. Myself, I'll wait for the full holographic set. 1080p will do until then, no glasses please.
  • anynigma - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    I guess my biggest concern over 3D, based on watching in theatres, is that brightness and clarity seems to suffer. I'd like to see 2D and 3D quality and contrast compared very carefully.
  • therealnickdanger - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    Every 3-D display I have demoed in person drives me nuts. It's not the flickering from the display, but rather the flickering of the world around the TV created by looking through the glasses. And yes, these were calibrated properly. Passive systems in theaters don't bother me nearly as much. I saw Avatar, Coraline, and Toy Story 3 with no ill effects... but the flicker ruins home viewing for me.

    Waiting for full HD, wide viewing angle autostereoscopic displays, plz. I don't care if it's 20 years away.
  • softdrinkviking - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link

    i had a similar experience in the local electronics stores.
    i can't say anything about "proper calibration," but i can tell you that it gave me a headache.
    the movies don't give me a headache, but i'm not really impressed either.
    all-in-all, i think i'd rather watch the movie without the glasses.

    as a side-note, i noticed that the 3D movies i have seen seemed dimmer to me, which was especially noticeable when i took off the glasses.
    has anyone else noticed that?
  • blagishnessosity - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    I remember when HDTV's first came out, no one was buying them because they were so expensive. I still do not own an HDTV. When I moved into my apartment a few years ago, I got a 36" tube TV for cheap on craigslist. Now I am looking to buy a plasma TV sometime next year at around the $900 range, so 3D isn't even on my radar screen. I've seen the demo's at the TV stores. It was "neat" but honestly not all that impressive. I will say I do enjoy seeing 3D movies in IMAX (ie. Avatar), but that is a rare treat and can't really be reproduced in the home because of the screen size. It's much easier to maintain the illusion of 3D when the theater screen takes up most of your line of vision. Consumer TV's are nowhere near large enough to do this, resulting in the 3D experience looking like a "neat" trick, but ultimately gimmicky.

    On a side note, almost every comment I've ever seen on any thread regarding anything 3D is complaints about having to wear 3D glasses. Honestly, the glasses do not bother me much. Maybe I'm the only person in the world who thinks this.
  • blagishnessosity - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    as a follow up to my previous comment, I think I would be more receptive to computer games in 3D because you sit so close to the computer monitor, it would probably be a better viewing experience. In addition, I think the "immersion" factor in games is more important because you are in direct control of everything that happens on screen. Lastly, computer monitors have always been a fraction of the price of flat panel televisions (and higher resolution to boot), so if there were a relatively cheap 3D computer monitor (<$300), I might be interested in that.
  • anynigma - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    I think it is important to realize that sometimes you don't know what you're missing until its gone. When I watch SD TV, I am really disappointed by how poor the image is now. My HDTV is so much better than SD that I sometimes will pass on watching a movie if its not HD.

    That being said, the same concept applies to 3D. I don't own one, and neither do any of my friends. Someday, when I come upon one, with glasses that fit over my perscription glasses, I expect to be impressed at the gimmick. My major concerns voiced above, (quality and brightness), prevent me from buying my own until I have this experience.

    Your point about computer games is apt, and I would love to play ps3 in 3D, siting nice and close to a 58 inch screen.
  • hackztor - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    Samsung just started putting perscription into the 3d glasses. This is a good start.

    Google samsung 3d perscription.
  • B3an - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    These prescription glasses will cost even more than the usual glasses. As if anyone, including myself, is going to pay this much for a gimmick. It's beyond ridiculous. Even if they were given away for free, which would never happen, i'd still very much doubt visually impaired people (or anyone else) would still be that interested in 3D TV as you'd still have to wear glasses. And the image quality is still going to suffer. AND you still have flickering issues.

    HD was great, it was really needed, and i often dont watch a film if i cant view it in HD, as someone else already said aswell.
    But as for 3D, it's a joke.
  • Exelius - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    3d is a fad. It hurts my eyes after 30 minutes and really doesn't add much to anything I've seen it used with. Until they can do it without glasses, it's going to remain a niche product. I have a 3d vision setup and I've used it maybe 3 times after the first week I owned it.
  • zoxo - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    The problem is not glasses, but ACTIVE glasses. Some years ago CRT TVs graduated from being 50hz to 100hz, but now with these active glass nonsense we're back to 60hz.

    Consumer 3D should be like theater 3D. Passive, circularly polarized glasses. (Or glassless would be better still.)
  • erikstarcher - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    I have been gaming for a while now with polarized glasses on an IZ3D monitor. I don't understand why everyone says it doesn't add anything to the experience. That is like saying that surround sound doesn't add to anything. When I play video games, anything that adds to the immersion factor makes it a better experience.
  • B3an - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link

    Things only add to the gaming experience when they dont also take things away. Using surround sound or having HD or higher resolutions dont take anything away, they just add to the experience. 3D on the other hand takes away image quality, colour accuracy, brightness, and has flickering.
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  • stottle - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    I thought one of the main reasons 3d hasn't worked before was because of the headaches you could get from watching at lower than 60Hz. I thought that was why we needed 120Hz TVs before the technology could take off. I guess I haven't been following close enough, but this is the first time I've heard that HDMI 1.4a only supports 24p, not 60p at 1080 resolution. Hasn't this been shown to cause problems? I know it was touched on in the article, but hasn't it been shown to cause problems?
  • flamethrower - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    First page of article:
    "...and the health warnings associated with 3D content viewing"
    There are health warnings associated with 3D content viewing? Are there actual health risks associated with this activity? There are health warnings associated with videogames but that doesn't seem to be hurting that industry.
  • ganeshts - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    Yes, there are health warnings and the effects are more easily visible / experienced compared to those associated with video games. Video game health effects are usually experienced after repeated usage, whereas headaches and nausea are experienced by many people after just 4 - 5 hours of viewing 3D content. The quality of the display and the shutter technology also plays an important role in this.

    In fact, the Samsung UN46C800 3D TV that I was setting up a few days back flashed the health warning message as soon as I switched on the 3D mode.
  • mac2j - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    Observation 1: The following sentence "3D is a fad" is popular with people over the age of 35. The rest of us, however, see it as a technology who's time has come and a market that will continue to expand as the technology matures.

    Observation 2: Home 3D TVs really need to be 120Hz if not 240Hz. Ideally native 120Hz similar to the way the 120Hz monitors work. The AMD 6800/6900 cards have Displayport 1.2 which would support up to 240Hz at 1080p - that would eliminate a lot of the visual compromises and any perceptable flicker. I don't know if the GTX580 has Displayport 1.2 support but hopefully HDMI 1.5 will support similar bandwidth levels.

    Observation 3: Better glasses tech is coming but we're stuck with some kind of glasses for many years from now.... although someone may get creative with the design so you can look through a fixed shield without actually wearing glasses or who knows, maybe to allow multiple customized focal points to eliminate the need. Real holographic 3D is 5-10 years off .... its just too much data at every level from imaging to processing to transmitting.... so if you can't handle any kind of glasses then you should just forget about 3D for a while.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    I strongly disagree with item number one. 3D has been attempted many times over the years, and every time it *was* a fad. Sure, you could say that the red/blue glasses were weak sauce, and they were, but polarized glasses have been around for a while and 3D still didn't catch on. Hollywood is pushing 3D hard now, with help from the HDTV makers and NVIDIA, but I would venture a guess that it has a lot more to do with trying to make money (i.e. you need to upgrade your 3-year-old 1080p HDTV; movie theaters need to go digital, etc.) than it does with thinking the current 3D is truly revolutionary. IMO, the "revolution" will come when we get affordable holographic displays, and that's a long ways off as you point out. (I'd guess more like 10-15 years minimum for them to reach the home).
  • RedemptionAD - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    The issue isnt that it hasn't been done before. It's that it hasnt been done right yet. Ditch the glasses make the screens affordable and I think it will be a winner. Look at current tech as raising funds for future tech to get it where it needs to be. HD has been out for close to a decade. Only in the last 3-4 years has it truly taken off. and regular broadcast tv was around for 50 years before HD became available.
  • mcnabney - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    The 3D BS is standing in the way of moving to 4k resolutions. Anything that requires the adjustment of vision is generally a niche product. People want things simple. Prjoectors have not taken over despite their compact size and intrinsic flat screen due to the requirement of darkness to watch the content. Tossing 3D into the mix of content will be a huge headache of having to keep expensive glasses nearby and take them off / put them on when the content changes. We could do 4k right now. Sony has had multilayer BDs that hold 100GBs for a few years. Most film masters and all of the scanned/archived content was done at ~4k which is the resolution limit of 35mm film. Displays for 4k have been out for some time now. This is the shift that makes the most sense due to the resolution being a plateau. It is the maximum image sharpness of 100 years of film. We have the exact audio, might as well have the exact video.
  • mac2j - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    I think its a stretch to say that 3D-capable TV development is hindering the move to 4K. 3D has just given them a way to get a slightly higher profit and larger market to buy into the higher contrast and frequency models.

    The major manufacturers sadly have plotted a slow scale up in resolution where we should see the first 1440p TVs next year ... 2160p in the next 5-7 years and 4K a few years after that. The only marginally good news is that a few companies demoed 2160p TVs at CES but none of them are being targeted at the consumer market any time soon.

    It seems like the limiting factor for even a low-medium resolution holographic 3D display (besides the obvious current lack of a good holographic projection system) might not be the processing power or data storage but the transmission bandwidth where we'd need 1000-10000x the current available maximums.
  • mcnabney - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link

    1080p is 'almost' 2k.

    1920x1080 is current HD
    2048x1152 is 2k - not a big difference, although some 2k is less letterboxy
    4096x3072 is the actual 3:2 4k standard, although it is more likely to see the HDTV resolution land at 4x1080p or 3840x2160. I have seen images and video at this resolution on demonstration kiosks and the image is absolutely spectacular. I would also point out that there is no need to make 4k televisions at sizes under 40" since nobody will sit close enough to see the difference. However, computer users can enjoy these displays right now, if you want to spend the money.
  • Vengeful Giblets - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link

    "How important is 3D technology to you?"

    Not at all important. The only reason why I'd ever own a 3D TV is because the feature happens to be built into a TV that I otherwise want. This is unlikely to happen any time soon because...

    a.) this "feature" drives the price way up and there's no way that I'm spending that much on a TV
    b.) I already have an HDTV for the living room and it works perfectly fine
    c.) I have a small HDTV for the kitchen
    d.) ergo It's not necessary to buy another one
  • yammerpickle2 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link

    I've worn corrective glasses for over two decades and I'm forty five years old so my eyes are not what they used to be. I've watch several 3D movies and demo's using the glasses over my normal glasses without a problem. Not saying I'd like to wear the glasses for 12 hours in a row, but 3 or 4 hours at time is no big deal. I have a big bright 54" Samsung non 3D HDTV that I love, but am willing to go out and get the gear for a 3D gaming rig. However, nobody can show me that 3D stereo surround works with 3 nice 50" plasmas at a native 3X1920X1080X60hzX2. I'd even love it more if the monitors where 4K with razor thin bezels. Sadly, even quad water cooled and overclocked GTX480's can not support that sort of resolution.
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  • Dipponhopper - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link

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  • Triple C - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    .

    It's been baffling to me to see so many negative attitudes towards this amazing technology. Right now I"m working on my 65" 3D Panasonic - Put on my glasses, and a fantastic game, like Half LIfe 2 and I'm blown away - Watch a 3d Nature documentary - It's like I'm there - EVERYONE who's come to my house and watche the 3d content is blown away. The 3d games are totally immersive, the sense of proximity in the nature shows changes the relevance of viewing entertainment. In regards to folks complaints of flickering - I suggest you dont' watch it in a room with bare neon lights that run at 60hz Neon lighting is bad to begin with, but couple that with 60hz per eye frame switching and you have a recipe for a bad experience.

    Why express so much negativity around this new technology? It's far out man.. This is progress folks - science has delivered us another step towards fully immersive environments -

    In regards to hurting your eyes - you do have to relax and not strain - some folks can't relax easily, I understand, but if you try not to force seeing it in 3d it gets alot beter. Could be your setup as well of course.

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