Channel 4 to become Channel 3D tonight

Oh dear .... Sainsburys

as in "Epic" fail ....

been trudging round 6 Sainsburys for these sodding glasses for me & the family. No surprise that they've all gone.

Why only make them available from the supermarket with the worst stock control in Britain ? Oh well, they've lost 3 viewers here.

Not worth the effort

Eight whole programmes, only one of which I have even a passing interest it. Wow. That coupled with the whole dealing with 3d card board glasses while having to wear actual spectacles and I think I'll just pass.

And so the 3D story continues as it ever did

great technology, pisspoor content

*sigh*

Q: What could possibly be more disturbing than watching Hannah Montanna?

A: Watching Hannah Montanna in stomach-churning 3D.

For extra value replace 'Hannah Montanna' with 'Paul O'Grady', 'JLS' etc.

Woot

Free glasses

I will get a set of 5 for my nvidia card :)

*god im a cheap git !!!

Anticipating Epic Fail

It doesn't look promising from wearing the glasses and watching the few trailers which had the 3D effect applied. Though that's perhaps because I didn't watch in a darkened room - one maybe would have thought they'd give instructions for use on the glasses themselves ?

The glasses are typical cardboard affairs, amber over left eye, blue over right. Don't know what happened in manufacturing but the way they were stamped out it seemed they weren't separated well in my Sainsbury's so if you picked up a pair, you got two. With no one bothering to spend time separating in-store it's perhaps not surprising they ran out.

It's generated a fair bit of publicity for C4 but I suspect it's going to put the case for 3D back decades. Those with glasses can try a pre-C4 preview here ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j-uRTsHC9k

I'm going to lie down now until the migraine passes.

If you want some of the Channel 4 branded glasses

I saw hundreds of them decomposing in a storm drain yesterday. I have a feeling a delivery man couldn't be bothered :)

They don't seem to be putting on much worth watching. You know the old adage about the driver of new technology? I can't help feeling it would have been more successful if Channel Five did it in the old days when they screened late night soft porn.

3D Glasses

Just to annoy us. They are doing 3D in Yellow/Red instead of Blue/Red

That means you can only use the "official" ones instead of any others you may have....

The polarizing lense ones work a lot better. but Im guessing the picture has to be in HD to work properly...

3D effect

I checked out the colorcode3d.com gallery pages using the 3D glasses to see how good it is, well, quite disappointing in fact.

Firstly, CGI artificially created content like the Monsters v Aliens trailor worked in certain scenes, but not others. In fact any CGI, including still images were pretty crap, probably due to the oversaturated colours they throw into those movies. They had a few real world videos on there and they mostly didn't work either.

Its true that for most people that bad headaches would hit you in a matter of ten minutes or so, it certainly happened to me. Its extremely uncomfortable to look at some things with them.

But what did work are the digital still photographs of daylight scenes, nice high resolution imagery. Theres one in a wooded area, a pathway leads into the woods, people are there, and a wooden fence lines the path on the left. Now that works great, but thats the only one, the rest are so so.

I think its this one - http://www.colorcode3d.com/gallery/cc3dgal/pages/27.htm

.

I noticed with lots of the 3D content that if you closed one eye you could still see details, edges/lines intended only for the other eye, which ruined the effect, and we're talking about content on ColorCode3Ds own website so the glasses are the right ones.

.

All in all a bit shit really. Quite how C4 expect you to sit thru at least 30 mins of this torture amazes me.

Polarized with TV: not yet

The polarizing glasses you use for "Up" etc. have one eye horizontally polarized and one vertically polarized. The two projectors then have similar polarizers; take the glasses off and you see the two full colour pictures overlaid. This is a completely passive system and works very well with cinema, though it needs either two synced projectors or a special dual lens projector. The glasses though are very cheap. The 3D effect is streets ahead of the anaglyph method used by Channel 4.

That is the problem with TV, one source of light, and it isn't polarized. A new HD TV could have half the pixels horizontally and half vertically polarized, but that would need double the bandwidth, or the picture would be reduced definition, and the brightness would be reduced (half the light from each pixel). The advantage is that it would work with stereo and non-stereo images, though a 3D image viewed without glasses would be blurred.

Another system (IMAX 3D) uses glasses with electronic LCD shutters over each eye. An infrared beam then switches the eye on in sync with the frame being displayed, left and right being interleaved. This system could be used for TV with extra hardware (set-top box even) switching the glasses. The glasses are of course much more expensive and need batteries to be kept charged. Again double the bandwidth is needed, or frame rate is halved. Definition stays the same.

However, we are stuck with anaglyphs for current TVs.

Glasses *ARE NOT* available in Sainsburys

So don't bother yer arse trying. I am not sure if they ever had any, but all the stores I have tried have none.

Epic fail from C4.

3D Glasses

@ Dale 3

Wow what a waste of time then.. It sounds like these glasses are hard to get hold of, at least some people have the red/blue ones kicking about.

It'll probably be rubbish anyway :-P

Coloured glasses should have died in the 80s

The only good thing about the C4 glasses from Sainsburys is they are a much better build quality than the American ones - hopefully a sign the British public is slightly more discerning!

I ordered some superbowl ones off ebay to watch the 3D Chuck episode a while back and the 3D is terrible compared to RealD in the cinema. The blue (right) side is a very vivid blue while the brown side lets most colours through in a muted fashion. I guess this relies on the left eye seeing the image while the right eye gets the 3D effect. If you have eyes which are not equal you will therefore either see less 3D effect (weak right eye) or in my case a disproportionate amount of blue (weak left eye) and almost no 3D.

Yeah can't wait for 3D!!

...oh wait...old tech....crap shows......

meh

Never watch C4 anyway...complete FAIL!

Broadcaster does something a bit different, for free

and Reg readers moan, moan, moan. Who would have thought it? You really are a bunch of miserable gits sometimes.

Flesh for Frankenstein

Saw that in 3D at the ICA, best bit - Joe Dellasandra's arse bouncing up and down over the audience, but Chanel4 3D week, awesome fail. How about 50's it came from outer space (packaged flat in the DVD release but supposedly the 3D effect was subtle rather than things poking out the screen), The ant bully, Avatar preview (in 3D) with maybe a 'short' interview with Cameron, Beowulf, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (terrible 80s film but fun), even Jaws 3D would've been better than Friday 13th 3D and would've gotten a bigger audience.

In fact, whoever programmed that awful lineup...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_3-D_films

and use red/blue tech next time - Jeez! Hannah Montana, T4, Paul O Grady, Derren Brown - shudder. The queen thing sounds interesting from an historical perspective, shame I can't watch, Morrisons is the only local supermarket and I'm not driving 24 miles on the off chance they're not out of stock (love me some double negatives).

Another form of Fail

Anyone "lucky" enough to get hold of some 3D glasses from Sainsbury's is in for another disappointment. The arms of the glasses are too short and you either have to bend the glasses between the lenses (acceptable workaround), hold them on your face at all times, or suffer sharp cardboard edges digging into the back of your ears. And before anyone suggests the obvious, I do not have a big head - in fact, it's probably smaller than the average.

Of course, using the glasses still gave me a headache after about 2 mins, but most C4 shows would do that anyway, so I doubt people will notice....

No C4 for me then

My nearest Sainsbury store is a round trip of over 30 miles, so they can bugger off!!!

Sainsbury's, C4 & Quality Street Wrappers...

... gives a ratings boost for a week whilst people fall over themselves to try something "fun".

Whereas if they removed Paul O'Grady, Historical trawls through the wastefulness of the monarchy, JLS and Hannah f**king Montana and replaced them with programs that can stimulate someone with a positive IQ might give them a permanent ratings boost.

Effort: 6

Idea: 3

Waste-of-money: 10

specs

If any of you had actually contacted C4 Viewer Enquiries, they'd have told you how to get glasses posted directly to you.

There was loads of glasses in my local Sainsbury's, too.

Pff, try harder whiners

Am looking at 2 pairs on my desk, that have been sitting there for about 2 weeks now. Have seen them in plenty of Saino's over the last month. Who'd have thought they'd all be gone by now eh?

Amber (left) and blue (right) quality street wrappers should do the trick tho.

Which 3d? = ColorCode 3D

I.e. this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy#ColorCode_3-D_.28blue-amber_method.29

Stu: woods are easy

Figures that a still of a wood would work well. Woods ought to be easy. They don't require full 3-primary colour to look right, you can do it with just 2. Early colour films made use of this fact.

Sainsbury's

I work at a fairly small Sainsbury's branch. Anyway, I have been refilling the stand of 3D glasses for the past 3 weeks and our branch has dispensed between 500-2000 pairs a day during that time. We had a couple of palettes stacked with them.

I've seen a lot of people walk out with 10 or more pairs. I've spoken to people who say their children have over 100 pairs at home. I think Sainsbury's should have given the glasses away during customer transactions or upon request. Sainsbury's don't want to be policing a giveaway though, they'd get slated for that too. I personally blame the massive fail here on a few peoples' idiotic greed and unwillingness to control their brats.

The whole thing must have been badly promoted too. I don't watch much TV myself but since the thing started tonight, my branch was inundated with enquiries about the glasses (out of 80ish phone calls I took today, only about 5 *weren't* about the glasses!!!). I wasn't allowed to put up a sign stating that we had no glasses left; instead I had to nominate a colleague to deal with queues of glasses enquiries. I saw her addressing crowds of 15 or more customers at a time!

The whole thing is just crazy and sad. One of my colleagues kept a few pairs back for a customer, he called later to tell me when he'd arrive. He was driving almost an hour to get the damned things. All day long, we've had lynch mobs telling us that we should have got more stock!

BTW, same goes for Call of Duty @ £26. We had about 400 copies a day for 5 days, queues everywhere and complaints flying in constantly because we sold out so quickly. In a store that normally sells about 10-15 console games a day (total), how could they possibly have predicted that? We've stocked plenty of other chart titles, much cheaper than the competitors and nobody seems to notice or care.

Better than some

Well its not too bad. At least its the amber/blue as opposed to the red/green. Theres certainly a bit more colour going on than recent blu-ray 3d offerings (coroline and that horror) that use the green/red variation.

Whats piss poor is that Friday the 13th or the sexy flesh for frankenstien arent in HD. They would have been "keepers"