Toshiba outs no-glasses 3D LED TV

Not OLEL or LED

The screen has 1440-LED backlight array.

i.e. It's an LCD screen.

The number of pixels and arrangement suggests a limited number of viewing zones.

Also it won't work at all for nearly 1/5th of people.

Sky HD 3D uses two images in a 1920x1080i frame, so 960 x1080i per Image.

http://www.techtir.ie/blog/watty/sky-launch-3d-channel

An expensive niche product?

Why it's small

Not sure you're necessarily right there.

If you've got a TV that size, it's going to be handheld by a single person, with a viewing distance of about 2 feet (3 feet at most, if you've got very long arms). At that kind of range, a dual-view screen (where every other pixel has a little prism in front of it sending the light left or right) will work fairly well.

But this simply doesn't scale up to larger distances, or to multiple people sat in front of it, and no amount of R&D will change that.

Basically, if you've got several people watching it who need 3D, either you need some way of stopping one eye seeing what the other eye should see (e.g. glasses), or you need to beam the picture direct to the eye. Read "Snow Crash" for one way of doing the latter.

Wow!!

Not only are they specs free but they possess gender as well. When will the girl versions be available I wonder?

Another reason for small size

Another reason for small size is that these will always be for individual personal use. Spec-less 3D technology has such a narrow visibility angle (the laws of physics, alas, until we evolve active-shutter or polarised eyes) that the notion of a big set in the lounge with the family gathering around it is sheer fairy tale stuff. So really no benefit (for 3D use in any case) in it being any bigger than required to sit on a desktop (or lap) immediately in front of the viewer.

It's not the first

Parallax barrier / lenticular displays have been around in various forms for a very long time. Yes they've been expensive but they have existed.

Still, it's a welcome development even though Toshiba should fire their product designer. I assume these things will sell for a huge premium yet they sport ugly thick borders and a style which looks like it fell out of a 1980's Bang & Olufsen catalogue.

Not title req'd.

How do they work? Are these screens the sort where you have to sit perfectly still otherwise you move between the two images? There has been an example of these in Harrods for ages, but frankly its never worked properly.

Still every step is a good step along the way to the holosuites! ;)

Depth

Out of interest can one of these displays generate the same sense of depth that a with-goggles 3D display can (even though the 3D TVs I've seen so far have demos that look like the 3D aspect was filmed on a Blue Peter or Playschool "set" made from cereal boxes and lollypop sticks).

It'll be fine.

If it's got just a subtle amount of depth, like the 3D lenticular DVD covers you get in shops, then it'll look great. They could use a similar tech. found on the Samsung 3D screens that convert 2D to 3D remarkably well, and you'll be watching normal TV with depth!

It'll be a hit, and people won't want to go back to their old 'flat' screens.

Seems like too many pixels...

"""These screens are complex - Toshiba's 20in set, the 20GL1, has 829m pixels, four times the pixel count of a 1920 x 1080 display. """

Some quick estimation tells me that a 1920x1080 screen should be around 2 mpixels, so your report of 829mpix might be off by a few orders of magnitude?

Too bad it'd got that massive chin thing attached, quad HD in a 20" would go great on my desk... Or a pair of them, rather.

A few musings:

Nexox Enigma: Don't forget that a single Computer Pixel is actually made up of 3 LED pixels (R/G/B), so a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 would require 6.2m physical pixels.

Still quite short of the ~223m pixels required by the article, though.

BTW: local information prices the 12in model at ~AUD14,000 (or, erm... 5,600 pounds?)