Here's an idea
Sell TVs with 2HD resolution, so that in 3D mode you get full HD. Not that anyone at a sensible viewing distance could tell the difference, unless they are selling 200" screens.
Sony is to release a passive 3D TV, and will follow it with OLED televisions next year, Reg Hardware has learned. The Japanese giant, which currently sells passive 3D monitors to broadcasters, has already begun shipping consumer-friendly models into the Chinese market. Sony’s passive Bravia screens are expected to make their …
Here's a better one.
Ignore 3D altogether and focus on 2HD.
Sorry but while I currently own a Sony 3D ready model, I don't own any of the 3D glasses nor do I ever intend on doing so. Yet I'm now considered a 3D consumer along w the interactive TV crap.
I know I can't be the only one who wants a TV that delivers the best picture possible., right?
The only leakage I've seen out of my LG is when you're not seated at an angle that allows you to look straight at the screen, and you're seated too near to the screen. This is the one inherent drawback with passive- look at the screen from a vertical angle other than straight-on and at too near a distance and crosstalk occurs.
I'm all for passive (I seriously find the flickery window of active glasses motion sickness inducing after trying an active one out at a Sony store. And oh, said glasses ran out of juice just two minutes after I turned it on), but yeah, they definitely need to double up the vertical resolution to 2160.
Actually with the Sony 3D TV's you don't really get that flicker in the corner of the eye but they are sensitive to the angle of the glasses then screen, if you tilt your head you get some colour shift (and cross talk). This is due to a different polariser set up on the glasses than some competitors.
The Sony glasses are designed to operate over prescription glasses. I know that there are companies developing designer passive 3D glasses and I think that prescription lenses are also probably available.
3D is a gimmick, and there are precious few movies that are a. 3D, and b. good films. (I'm not really a sports fan, but until Sky release their stranglehold on Football/Cricket/F1 I'm also out of the market)
OLED displays, on the other hand, are magnificent in the dark, which is the ideal for watching TV and movies. My phone has a "clock" screensaver (you get black for free on OLED) which is particularly spooky in the dark - the digits just hang in mid-air - the black areas are just "not there".
To see that kind of contrast performance with a 40" screen would be amazing...
... but to see it next year at under £4000 would, I'm sorry to say, be a complete fantasy. Oh well.
I too want a nice big OLED TV, and was hoping for it year, but you can get pretty damn close to your floating digits with a decent dimming LED these days.
I'm a bit worried however that OLED might not be as great as expected. With a 99% black screen on my PSP Vita, I can see slight variances of lighting around the edges. Hardly noticeable at 5", a different story at 50"?
I've seen a few Sony 3D sets, and they all suffered from horrible cross-talk.
I know passive should have cross-talk, but the way they're going, Sony will have figured out a way to make it happen.
I miss the old days of Discman's and Walkman's. Sony made good kit back then :(
Like pretty much every human being on the planet, my eyes were happier when TV went HD. My eyes are not so happy with active shutter 3D. It's simply not a comfortable viewing experience, not just the glasses, but the flickering, the loss of brightness and contrast, and the often cringeworthy efforts of the films producers to present certain scenes as 3D demonstrator content (I'm looking at you Alice in Wonderland).
So passive 3D jettisons the glasses (good) but regresses back to SD..
The words 'straws' and 'clutching' spring to mind. Although, 'horse', 'flogging' and 'dead' might be more apt.
A gimmick from the start and it's not going to get any better using the current technologies. 3D films have such an artificial 3D look with an exaggerated foreground against a background and not much in between. It detracts from the artistic direction and sometimes the narrative. Not to mention a slightly blurry image that I personally experience.
Panasonic's 3D implementation on the current generation of TV's is very good, very subtle and works well (at least in the Currys shop where I've seen it!) but passive 3D, specifically LG's version, REALLY hurts my head. Just feels horrible and fake. I still think that 3D is a massive failure and the general public aren't stupid enough to buy into it. That's why it's almost impossible to buy a TV that ISN'T 3D at the moment. they're just trying to force us into it.
If all 3D films were MADE in 3D live Avatar and Hugo then fine but all this post processing pi$h just makes it look like cr@p. Someone mentioned Alice in Wonderland but add Tron Legacy, Gulliver's Travels and Clash of the TItans in there just for starters. 3 TERRIBLE movies but which were post converted to 3D in order to sucker people into watching them. There should be a standard where it specifically tells us "Filmed in 3D" or "Converted Post Production".
I think I'll just wait until I can get a decent 3D projector, at least that way you'll only use it for good movies and not tennis in 3D. I mean really, who cares!!??
I won't argue that native 3D is better, but it's not post-conversion that causes crap viewing, only cheap post-conversion knocked off in a rush. Lucas took his sweet time over The Phantom Menace and spent the money on it, and it really showed. (Though it didn't make the movie wonderful, obviously.)
Passive means without glasses right? If so I've seen such a screen in action and it wasn't great. Yes the illusion was Impressive but you had to be at the right angle/distance. Also the resolution seemed very low presumably due to the trickery and lenses involved.
Presumably Sony are improving the tech. But I still can't see it catching on. It's just an excuse to get everyone to buy new kit again.
No, Passive 3D still uses glasses, but they are just simple circularly polarized lenses. A polarizing filter on the screen means that each eye sees a slightly different image at the same time, which generates the 3D effect.
Active 3D uses powered glasses that have LCD lenses that flicker on and off in sequence. The screen displays the left image and the glasses shutter the right lens, then the screen displays the right image, and the left lenses go dark.
The Active glasses need power, and have to be synchronized with the screen, and each eye only gets 25 images per second. The passive glasses are exactly the same as the once used in the cinema - you can buy them for a couple of quid, so the kids can watch a 3D movie with their friends without breaking the bank.
As for which is better? DisplayMate, a company that made display calibration software, reckons that human eye actually sees more detail with Passive 3D than with Active 3D:
http://www.displaymate.com/3D_TV_ShootOut_1.htm
(Disclaimer - I just bought an LG 3D screen, because I was getting a new TV anyway, and getting the 3D model didn't cost much more than the 2D model, and I have a 78 year old relative recently discovered the wonders of 3D photography, and he enjoys being able to share his creations with someone. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have bothered if Active Shutter 3D was my only choice).
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What you're thinking off is Autostereoscopic 3D, the type used by the 3DS. Passive 3D still needs glasses. It just that the glasses are simple light polarization lens instead of flickery LCD 3D glasses.
I'm quite happy with 3D now that I've gone ahead for one. WipEout HD and Super Stardust/Star Strike looks good on my LG, and I've finally got to catch the first 10 seconds of Megamind in 3D after missing it at the cinema due to me entering the hall late because of bad traffic and a twit of a couple in front of me in the ticket queue not being able to make up their mind on what movie to watch.
On stereoscopic images (it's not 3D!). From what I understand passive viewing on HDTV's uses alternate lines of a 1080 display giving you 720p per eye? But when viewed your brain does not give you a 720p image as they are merged back to 1080 lines when viewed with both eyes?
Please chime in if I am wrong about this because if not I can't see what the fuss about half resolution on passive viewing is.
Well you are slgihtly wrong.
1080p which is 1920x1080 becomes 1920x540, so 540p. Half the lines go left, half the lines go right. Still get 1920 pixels per line though.
Of course how long will it take before someone makes a screen that is natively 1920x2160 and then makes passive 3D with 1920x1080p for each eye. After all 4k x 2k screens are being worked on.
They don't really need to go 4k by 2k with this. All they need is 1. a 1920x2160 polarized LCD panel (horizontal rectangle pixels similar to Apple Lisa pixels so the screen still turns out 16:9 widescreen), and 2. circuitry to convert 3D signal to interlacing 1920x2160 p60/p50/p24 interlaced. In 2D mode, two pixels are vertically combined to form a square pixel, while in 3D mode the two pixels are operated independently.
Maybe the problem in this is that it requires a custom LCD panel that no one has ever used before and thus will drive the price up significantly?
Bootnote: I'm aware that only frame-packed 3D signals are 1920x1080, which are apparently only found on blu-ray discs- most games will output in 1920x540 vertical (seen this on my PS3 when playing 3D games) even if the console supports bitpacked 1920x1080 3D, and most pay TV decoders actually output in 960x1080 horizontal (seen this on a few channels on two different pay TV providers).
Obviously the previous posters missed your point. Yes you are right, all this fuss about half resolution (and yes, it is 540 lines per eye) is complete drivel.
True, each eye only gets 540 lines but the key is that they are displayed at the same time, so at any one point in time you are still seeing 1080 lines (just like active shutter).
The real downfall with passive compared to active is that if you sit a bit too close you can see the affect of the film polariser on the screen and see the interlace structure - try closing one eye and you'll get what I mean. At reasonable viewing distances though (I'm talking over about 5 feet from a 50" screen) you can't see it at all.