Kittenman, a ton of money and time is being invested in learning how to convert 2D content to 3D images at a lower cost and faster. Some conversions are done more or less by hand, and take months millions of dollars to convert a feature film. Other technologies -- such as the ones included in some 3DTVs -- can do the conversion in real time. The big difference is the quality of the results. Huge strides are being made in automating the process to create fairly good 3D conversions, and I expect that we'll start seeing lots of back-catalog 2D television episode and movie content become available in 3D within two years or so.

For now, the real time conversion in the TV sets has serious limitations. The demonstrations that I have seen have no negative Z effects (no objects appear to be between the viewer and the screen) and the objects themselves tend to have little or no depth. This means that watching a soccer game (football to the rest of the world) results in cardboard cutouts running around the field. I find that I prefer even this flawed 3D over 2D, because it helps me see the relative position of the players much better, and I can better judge the ball's position across the width of the field. YMMV, but at this point, I would hesitate to recommend that you get a 3D set with the expectation that you'll watch a lot of auto-converted 2D content.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

AngryDeuce, I seriously doubt that your symptoms are psychosomatic. Stereoscopic 3D works by tricking your brain. Your eyes have to focus on a plane that is a fixed distance from your eyes, but they have to converge on images that are apparently closer or further than that distance. Different people react differently to the conflicting feedback they get, which the industry calls "accomodation". The fact is that not all stereoscopic images are the same. If the conflict within the information is great enough, just about anyone with binocular vision will experience discomfort if not actual pain.(I've been subjected to some really bad stereoscopic images, and it's not fun.) Just as color or focus can be over-manipulated in a movie, so can the 3D effect. That was one of the breakthroughs of Avatar; the 3D was used to augment the story, not be the story. And the effects were done skillfully. The most dangerous images are the ones with "negative Z" effects, which means that the objects appear to be between you and the screen; positive Z means that they appear to be beyond the screen. Negative Z effects are most likely to cause discomfort, and can be executed well or poorly with very different results for the viewer. The content-generating industry is getting much more skilled on managing stereoscopic effects, and I expect that the portion of the audience that experiences discomfort will decline, but it is not likely to ever reach zero.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

Strack, you get close to that today for less than you might expect. Four inexpensive 20-inch 1080p TVs on a single stand will give you the resolution you seek at much less than the cost of a 40-inch 4K display. Personally, I use a dual monitor setup even though I have a four-monitor stand on hand, and I find that it is plenty of screen real estate for my needs.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

Uttbuggly, thanks for the question. There's a lot of information (and misinformation) flying around about the relative merits of passive and active glasses. Personally, I don't think that the interleaved issue of passive displays is important; 1080i is also interleaved, and our brains appear to stitch the images together without losing apparent resolution.

But on this subject, I will defer to Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate. Ray is a "display expert's display expert" and an uncurable empiricist. There's never been a display industry technology assumption that he has not challenged in his labs. And he performed an exhaustive series of real world tests on a set of passive and active 3D sets which he has published -- for free -- on his website at http://www.displaymate.com/3D_TV_ShootOut_1.htm. I recommend that anyone curious about this issue read Ray's report thoroughly. One of his surprising results was that small details -- such as text -- are actually much clearer on a passive set than an active one. This runs counter to the "lost resolution" argument, which is why I love empirical results (and why it's a good thing that I went into computer and display technology instead of high explosives).

And yes, he address the question of brightness specifically in his tests and his report. Comparing the sets in 2D and 3D modes, you do lose lots of light. (This is a big problem for 3D cinema as well.) You start off by losing half the light right off the bat, and then you can lose more depending on the characteristics of the glasses being used. But according to Ray's tests, you lose much more with active than you do with passive, and he explains why that is so.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

They're like volcanos; there is no explanation.

Alfred Poor
Gulfhaven, FL

Excellent points, demonbug. I agree completely that there is more to the human perception systems than is credited by the "conventional wisdom." We can't hear frequencies above some limit (and that limit is much lower for me now than it was 40 years ago), yet we can "notice" quarter-wave differences in phase which form the basis for psychoacoustic effects such as surround sound from stereo speakers. I completely accept that we may well by able to "resolve" much finer details than indicated by the traditional 1 arc-minute limitations, especially under some conditions. (Under other conditions, the same average person's resolution be quite less. For example, two shades of blue may appear different under some circumstances, but identical under others.) And I certainly accept that the visual acuity of different individuals is likely to vary widely.

So the issue is not so much whether there is some fixed line that divides Acceptable Image Quality from Not Acceptable. I accept that this is a moving target for many good reasons that make the boundary conditions difficult (probably impossible) to identify with precision. Instead, I'd argue that having a general, fuzzy approximation is better than having none at all, and that while the 1 arc-minute "conventional wisdom" is limited, it probably does okay as a rule of thumb to get closer than an order of magnitude from the optimal choice.

Translation: listen to the experts and the reviews and all, but trust your eyes. Go to the store and look at the screens, and decide for yourself how big a screen you need to have so that you can see the fine detail when you're as far from it as you will be in your living room. Nothing beats the Mark II Eyeball as a predictor of future satisfaction.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

First, neokushan, I understand completely about the problems that people with monocular vision face with stereoscopic 3D, and the fact that it is a useless feature for them. My brother is in this situation, so I get it.

But we went through this in the transition from black and white to color TV, too. Colorblind people don't get much more (if anything) from color TV, yet they are still able to enjoy it just as much as if the color were turned off. In the same way, stereoscopic 3D can always be "turned off" to just show the left or right image of the frame, so it will always be compatible with monocular vision; all the needed information is in there. And if you're watching in "mixed company", blocking the image for your weaker eye will give you a tradtional 2D image; you'll just need to wear the glasses to get it.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

That's a great chart, Moryath, and it seems to correlate well with the results I got from my own calculations; 47" is the minimum size for a 1080p set when viewed at a distance of 6 feet.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

I agree that we won't have holographic or other "true" 3-dimensional imaging for general entertainment content any time soon. Adding a second HD image to the data stream doesn't double the bandwidth requirements, but it does require much more than just one image per frame. We may be able to squeeze that into the current distribution pipes, but that's probably about it for now. In order to get volumetric images that you can "peek around" will require many more images per frame, and the bandwidth requirements for distribution will grow rapidly. We will need to solve that problem (among others) before true "no glasses" 3D will be a reality. That is a long, long, way off at this point.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

There certainly are 4K displays now; they've been demonstrated for years. The problem is that we don't have a distribution system for them; the same was true for HDTV. We had the display resolutions (especially on computer monitors) long before we had a system to distribute broadcast content, or the infrastructure to create the content for that matter.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac

Yes, 4K television is under development. ("4K" is roughly equivalent to 4 times the resolution of 1080p, for those not familiar with the term.) I would not recommend waiting for 4K for several reasons. First, people are fine with watching DVDs (which are standard definition) on their HDTVs right now, and don't even bother getting the Blu-ray version of a movie (which is high definition). They tend to sit too far from the screen for its size, which means that they can't see the added detail anyway. They're not going to sit twice as close (or get a set twice as large) in order to get the extra detail that 4K offers. And we're probably at least 10 years away -- if that -- from having a distribution system (broadcast and physical media) that can get the image to your set in the first place. So I'm not going to postpone my purchase just for 4K technology.

Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac