[By Will Greenwald, PC Magazine]
I’ve worked with many HDTVs in the PCMag Labs. Most of them are 3D-enabled. Of those, the majority use active shutter glasses to display 3D content. Of those, all of them are generally seen as just “HDTVs” by consumers, with their 3D abilities ignored or outright dismissed. 3D as a feature in home entertainment might be getting more market share as more HDTVs get 3D support, but in terms of people actually watching 3D movies, users simply don’t care.
The usual argument about why 3D is having a hard time picking up steam is the issue of wearing glasses. The logic is that no one wants to wear special glasses while they watch a movie or play a video game at home. That’s certainly a factor, but it’s too broad an excuse. The main problem with 3D HDTV adoption is active shutter glasses. It’s not just about wearing glasses while watching movies, but about wearing bulky, expensive, powered glasses while watching movies. Based on all of this, it’s clear how to make 3D finally come into its own in home theaters: passive 3D. Vizio has realized this. LG has realized this. It’s only a matter of time before the other HDTV makers realize this as well.
Almost no 3D HDTV that uses active shutter glasses includes glasses with the HDTV itself. If you want 3D with your new 3D HDTV, you’re going to have to pay between $50 and $200 per user to get glasses, in addition to the screen. That’s a hefty investment. On average, enough active shutter glasses for a family of four will bump up the price of an HDTV between $400 and $600. That’s a pretty huge chunk of change just for watching 3D content. That’s in addition to the (increasingly small but still present) premium added to 3DHDTVs themselves. In contrast, the LG Infinia 47LW5600 comes with four pairs of filtered glasses, and you can snag more glasses at any movie theater with RealD 3D. Heck, for the price of one $150 pair of active shutter glasses, you can buy 56 pairs of passive 3D glasses on Amazon.com.
The price isn’t the only issue. Active shutter glasses are larger, heavier, and less comfortable than passive 3D glasses. Active shutter glasses need enough bulk to hold the electronics necessary to receive synchronization data from the HDTV and activate the shutter lenses. They look more like visors than glasses, often large and clunky. Even Samsung’sultra-light glasses (sold at a premium price of $219.99) look more like a set of Buddy Holly lenses glued to a Luke Cage tiara.
Meanwhile, whether they’re cheap and ugly or expensive and streamlined, passive 3D glasses look and feel like glasses. They’re much more comfortable, generally sitting on the ears and bridge of the nose like regular glasses and not squeezing the head like most active shutter glasses. They’re also much lighter; a pair of cheap, pack-in passive 3D glasses weighs 0.5 ounces and a pair of Gunnar’s high-end, all-metal Phenom 3D glasses weighs 0.6 ounce. Samsung’s ultra-light 3D glasses weigh a full ounce, and Sony’s active shutter glasses weigh a whopping 2.1 ounces.
Finally, there’s the convenience factor. Active shutter glasses need to be powered, through either a disposable or rechargeable battery. If the battery is disposable, you have to replace it every 10 or 15 movies. If the batteries are rechargeable, you have to plug the glasses in occasionally to keep them charged. In both cases, you need to remember to turn the glasses on and keep them (and you) in line of sight of the HDTV’s infrared emitter. It’s a handful of mild hassles that add up to too much effort to sit on the couch and watch a movie. Passive 3D glasses, on the other hand, always work. They’re just polarized lenses that separate the picture. The only thing you have to do is put them on.
Passive 3D isn’t a perfect solution. It has a major flaw active 3D screens lack: a drop in resolution. Because passive 3D must display two different images at once, it could only show, in the case of 1080p footage, 1920 by 540 pixels to each eye. Now, this doesn’t mean you’re getting a 1920 by 540 picture instead of a 1080p picture; it just means you’re getting a 1920 by 540 picture in each eye, combining into the full 1080p picture. You’re still seeing the full 1080 horizontal lines, just distributed between both eyes instead of the full number shown to each eye. The picture actually combines fairly well, and most users can’t tell a difference in resolution. Even if the resolution was inferior, the convenience of passive 3D glasses potentially outweighs that. After all, once you invested in an HDTV and a Blu-ray player, did you throw out your DVD collection because they weren’t HD? Do you only watch HD content on Netflix, or do you watch whatever you want to watch? Video quality is indeed vital, but if you just want to kick back and enjoy a movie, convenience matters.
As long as watching 3D HDTVs requires wearing bulky, expensive, uncomfortable, inconvenient active shutter glasses, users aren’t going to see 3D as an everyday feature for their home theaters. While any glasses are inconvenient, passive, polarized 3D lenses fix the majority of the issues found in 3D HDTVs. They’re light, cheap, comfortable, and you don’t need to futz with them. This isn’t just the issue of wearing glasses; it’s the issue of going out and buying expensive glasses, charging them, then wrapping them uncomfortably around your head while keeping in line-of-sight with your HDTV’s emitter. It just costs too much money and effort. With passive 3D, you can just pick up a cheap pair of glasses you keep in your junk drawer, lie back on the couch, and start watching.
If you pick up an LG or Vizio HDTV with passive 3D, you’re probably going to watch a 3D movie within weeks of getting the HDTV. After all, they come with 3D glasses you don’t have to charge and are extremely light, and you can easily replace them with even more comfortable, better-looking 3D glasses you won’t be ashamed to wear outside. Ideally, 3D HDTVs wouldn’t require glasses at all, but we won’t see that for some time. As in, the future, when our computers are powered by lasers and cheese. Current autostereoscopic (glasses-free 3D) technology is limited to small-scale, individual-use devices like the Nintendo 3DS, and is unfeasible for large devices like 3D HDTVs. Until the technology develops to the point where four people can sit on a couch and watch 3D HDTV without glasses, passive 3D is where it’s at.
See the original post here; http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385438,00.asp
