Panasonic demands 1080p 3D TV 'standard'

Panasonic wants the consumer electronics industry to come together and join it in the development of a standard for full HD 3D TV. Even if its call falls of deaf ears, the Japanese giant will start selling tellies capable of displaying a 3D image at 1080p resolution in 2010, it said today, along with a Blu-ray Disc player …

[Mark Wood]

3D - Why?

Why would anyone want the eyestrain and headaches caused by a 3D display at home? Or has technology advanced enough that this is no longer a problem?

[Michael Kean]

Funny Glasses 8-)

G'day :)

Yesterday I visited an IMAX theatre for the first time, which does a very nice job of 3D - with images that can appear from infinity up to about 50cm from your face.

A quick spot of experimentation showed that the glasses they use are simply polaroid glasses but with the lenses polarised horizontal and vertical. (Easily demonstrated by holding my polaroid clipon sunnies in front of the funny glasses and rotating them until they allowed no light through)

I'm a little curious as to why the 3D TV spec doesn't use this approach instead of the planned 'rapid flicker' method. I guess it's so they don't have to halve the resolution and polarize pixels on a very precise scale - something I don't think the cinema has to worry about since they project two images onto the one screen.

I would have thought that for viewability, the half resolution dual polarized method would be more convenient for the consumer :) All LCDs are polarized by design, but plasmas aren't so perhaps the drop in light level polarizing a plasma output is too severe and hence the design. Or perhaps they just want to sell glasses.

[Jon Minhinnick]

Re: Funny glasses

"the glasses they use are simply polaroid glasses but with the lenses polarised horizontal and vertical."

Nitpicking, but they're actually at +45 and -45 degrees, not 90 and 0. This is because projected light reflecting off the Imax screen will predominantly be polarised in a vertical or horizontal plain depending on where you're sitting in the theatre (think glare off water or snow), in addition to the encoded polarisation used for the 3D effect. Using the +-45 filters means both eyes will filter the glare equally and prevent shimmer between eyes.