Glasses on, lights out
Did you see Avatar in 3D? Amazing, was it not (give or take a little live-action flicker)? With 3D cinema projectors increasingly prevalent even in surprisingly ropey local movie houses, the new breed of advanced 3D is wowing filmgoers.
So naturally, there is a helter-skelter rush to get a domestic version ready — 3DTV for the home. As you’ll see in the tales brought home from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by our Reviews Editor Edgar Kramer, the major TV manufacturers are aiming to get 3D-ready TVs out this year or early next. Many countries are already on a promise of some 3D broadcasts — the UK and Ireland from BSkyB; the United States from Discovery, ESP and Sony; Japan and Korea as well. Foxtel here has “expressed an interest”. Some soccer World Cup matches will be filmed in 3D. Blu-ray players should need only software changes to replay 3D content; Sony is promising a firmware update for the PlayStation 3 to create PlayStation 3D!
You will, of course, need a new telly, and glasses. Nearly all the TV manufacturers have chosen not to use the polarised glasses that you most likely donned for your cinema 3D experience. Polarisation requires filters to be applied to the TV screen, so that odd-numbered lines emit light polarised in one direction, even lines in the other. On the plus side you can show both images at once, and the glasses are cheap; on the downside you halve the vertical resolution and most likely cut brightness and contrast significantly.
It’s rather easier (for TV manufacturers at least) to go with the more expensive active shutter glasses, which block one eye’s vision entirely, then the other, in sync with alternating TV pictures. So to maintain, say, 1080p at 50Hz, the TVs will need to display 1080p at 100Hz. Which is fine; there’s no shortage of 100Hz (and higher) LCD panel technology.
There have been technical questions over whether LCD panels can refresh rapidly and accurately enough to sync reliably with shutter glasses — the far more rapid switching rate of plasma cells is more shutterfriendly, says this view. All I can say is that I’ve seen a good few 3D demos on LCD panels, and Edgar saw a dozen more at CES 2010. The results were pretty good. Under demonstration conditions, at least.
Because I do see one problem. If you’re expecting a home system to present anything approaching the cinema 3D effect of Avatar (or Alice in Wonderland or Monsters vs Aliens), you’d better be planning a dedicated bigscreen home cinema with a digital projector. Your average lounge-room family TV will be severely compromised for 3D viewing.
Three things are highly detrimental to effective 3D — off-axis viewing, ambient light, and a viewing distance greater than the diagonal size of the screen. Most viewing rooms in casual use will suffer from all three of these. It’ll help if the family dims the lights, hugs together and beds down for a proper movie, games or sports night.
(Interestingly, these same three elements of detraction also suggest that computer monitors will provide a far more effective 3D environment — close-up on-axis viewing with potentially lower ambient lighting.)
It’s also worth remembering why Hollywood brought 3D back to the cinema — to create something different to home viewing. Filmmakers know that watching movies at home today can be so darned thrilling that it has rendered cinemas near redundant. Home AV systems can approach cinema resolution, exceed the quality of cinema sound, and all without snotty kids eating popcorn behind you (depending on your family arrangements). When I interviewed Jeffrey Katzenberg (CEO of Dreamworks Animation) last year (S+I Nov/Dec 09), he was quite clear that the goal of 3D movies has been to “raise the theatre exponentially [sic] above what we can do in the home”.
And it’s working. Ever since I was exceedingly impressed by the cinema 3D of Monsters vs Aliens, I’ve been going to the cinema exclusively for 3D movies, and usually specifically because they’re 3D. You can no longer ‘wait for the Blu-ray’ — if you want the full experience, you have to get to your local 3D cinema before the film’s run ends.
So you can put 3D in the home, but quite possibly as Katzenberg says, “it’s not going to be as immersive”. (Mind you, I notice he was at Samsung’s CES launch spruiking the 3D Blu-ray release of Monsters vs Aliens, so he’s inserted at least one foot in the home market.)
From what we saw at CES, the TV manufacturers seem convinced of a 3D home market, or at least are very keen to generate one. And the 3D TV demos so far have been great fun. We’re largely in the dark as to how much it’s likely to cost us. But then we may need to be in the dark to enjoy it.
Cheers,
Jez Ford, Editor
www.twitter.com/jezford
Sound + Image: Vol.23#04 February/March 2010
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