Yanks spend big on 3D

Simple explaination for this.....

.... Avatards!!!

A fool and his money...

Muppets. Every one of them. No doubt the rest of their spare cash is spent on 24-bit DACs for their 16-bit audio source, shampoo that promises to bring their hair back from the dead and prozac for their dog.

My particular favorite are the sets that claim to somehow magically extract 3D from a 2D broadcast, the pixellated equivalent of extracting gold from lead http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/06/toshiba.3d.tv/index.html). If you've bought one of these I have a perpetual motion machine you may be interested in.

no thanks

3D is crap. It dampens colors, it makes fast animations impossible to follow, and the glasses are heavy and usually dirty. The benefit is pretty much irrelevant on any scene that doesn't have an enormous depth of field, and even then, it's not worth the downsides.

I've already started explicitly looking for cinemas that do 2D showings of films I like, and if we get to the point where finding a 2D showing is hard, I'll drastically reduce my cinema-going in favor of rentals.

I hope 3D dies once the novelty wears off.

Not necessarily a dearth of content..

If consumers are looking for stereoscopic material, then yes, it's going to be difficult.

However, if a PC is linked up to it, suddenly most 3D games and modelling apps become playable stereoscopically. For some games it isn't a gimmick - it's a genuine new feature. Unfortunately all 3D technologies have some disadvantages.

The fairly cheap Zalman 19" monitor I have is not a great 2D monitor, but it manages. In 3D mode the vertical resolution is halved, the vertical viewing angle is small, positioning is key (it's currently on top of a foot of books) and some games suit it better than others.

The key is when it works, it really works particularly well. There's proper depth perception, and images floating in 'front' of the monitor are very impressive.

Of course, it still depends on decent content. Avatar was an impressive 3D showcase but a subpar film. Alice in Wonderland's 3D wasn't as good, but the film a little better.

Meaningless

The fact that most of the high end TV's available now happen to support 3D doesn't mean that it's actually being used. The more interesting thing to look at would be the number of stupid 3D glasses that have been sold - since those are exclusively useful for actually watching 3D content it would be a better indicator of how 3D is catching on.