Slick’s Quick Hits: The state of 3D home viewing.

It seems that fans of the new “Real” 3D effect really will need to slap down the extra coin for a 3DTV. I was on one of my Best Buy excur­sions yes­ter­day and who do I bump into but Mr. My Take Radio him­self, Rich. Being the tech junkies that we are, we look at all the new home the­ater equip­ment and notice that the Mag­no­lia sec­tion had a 3D setup. We wanted to com­pare this one to our expe­ri­ence at the Sony store, espe­cially since the setup here was Pana­sonic (2009’s top 5 rated tele­vi­sions were from Pana­sonic or Sam­sung, no Sony mod­els). The pic­ture itself was of course beau­ti­ful but the 3D was severely lack­ing com­pared to what we had expe­ri­enced with the Sony model. First and fore­most, the Pana­sonic glasses felt cheap. The 3D lenses sit off of your face and they look and feel like a clip on. Worse than that, a lot of the 3D effects seemed to not come off the screen while oth­ers did. To Panasonic’s credit, the per­spec­tive effect was awe­some even when the 3D was not. If you move to a dif­fer­ent view­ing angle, the 3D effect adjusts to your posi­tion. The mis­take we made was that we thought the TV was a 3D TV; it was not. It was a Pana­sonic Plasma hooked to a Pana­sonic 3D Blu-Ray player. What we con­cluded this will mean is that peo­ple who for exam­ple have a PS3 and get the 3D firmware upgrade will have what I am call­ing a gimped 3D expe­ri­ence if they choose to not buy a 3D TV. I have said on the show that the TV in the Sony store was play­ing Lit­tleBig­Planet, a game not designed for 3D and the effect was quite pro­nounced. So as of right now, if you have a 3D player, but a 2D TV, you will not get as vivid an expe­ri­ence as some­one who has a 3DTV and a stan­dard player. Of course the opti­mal sit­u­a­tion would be to have both if you want to enjoy 3D, but I hope that future upgrades will make it so that any­one can truly enjoy 3D (if they want to) with any combination.

Handel

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