I want your opinion on 3D TV...RIGHT NOW!

Daniel hit it spot on. 3D content filmed in 3D (and not just remastered) with a 3D set looks great. Everything else is stupid. 3D is here because they needed a reason to make us upgrade from 1080 sets. Most can't tell 720 from 1080, so who is going to buy an even higher density set?

As to which TV to buy, it is pretty obvious: Samsung. They are the leader and they have the best technology, best display factories, best display chemistry, best display overall, and an adequate to impressive lineup of designs and configurations.

Also if buying new, do not even waste your time with 60Hz sets. Yes anything above is interpolated (it is interpolated at 60 even) but that fast interpolation screws with the brain and makes it "appear" smoother. We had the first Samsung 52" 240Hz set and for the first couple days it looked like you were watching a play at a theatre it was so lifelike. Now it is "normal" but all other tv's look like crap. Recently got a 55" 240Hz (with all the gizmos like 3D and internet) and it is the same thing, awesome picture that cannot be beat. With black friday deals coming up, I would wait a week and grab a deal. Even online sales are impressive this time of year.

Also, do not be fooled by how they look in one store. Especially those that hide the remotes. Note that in florescent lighting (aka store lighting) it looks different then when you are at home unless you live in a Walmart. Also it is a known practice to fiddle with the brightness, contrast, and other dynamic settings on display sets to get people to buy the larger profit margin.

Grab the remote and restore defaults to the monitor. If they let you hook it up in a normal room, then do so. There was a store around here that closed down recently that allowed you to take the tv to a private room with a floor lamp and a window and see how it looked. That is how it should be done. At a minimum, get rid of the showroom display settings that screw with everything.

 

If you know where to look it is.

I got my $4500 Samsung TV for $2000 including white glove delivery. Which means they take it off the freight truck and into your living room instead of leaving it by your mailbox or if your lucky the front porch for the snow.

I would not go to Walmart/BestBuy/Whatever-Big-Box-Store because yes they are weird models or crappy models or even discontinued items. I did pick my sister up a tv on black friday last year as well. It advertised to have HDMI inputs, DVI inputs, component inputs, and composite inputs. Well it has a singular of each of them. And they are all shared. So 1 input source in any of the 4 holes lol. Doesn't matter because all she needed was a cable box to hookup to it. For $200, I won't complain. But the cheap deals have their market (i.e. my technologically inept sister).

And if you want a sincher, Samsung makes many of the components found in Apple products including their gorgeous screens. I hate Apple, love Samsung, and give credit where credit is due. So if you love you some mac mr. macmaster, Samsung is as close as you'll get to the iScreen.

 

Good. You looked into the difference between LCD and LED. While it is true that LED allows for a slimmer TV, the difference is simply the type of back-lighting. If you have heard about how amazing (and amazingly expensive) OLED is, you might think that going from LCD to LED is a step in that direction, in which case you would be cheated.

And you are the OP? I was epicly tired when writing that post

That said. I hope they will start to use 3D to show different pictures for every player when you have a friend over for video games.

 

I'm surprised the 3D craze has lasted this long, again.

 

So far the only OLED HDTV I have seen was a 20" Sony, approx $20,000.00 The larger one was way more....
Yeah the picture looks fantastic, buy the price per sq/in is ludicrius for now!...

 

Ok I don't think anyone mentioned the big 3D "winner" this year is the new LG 55LW6500
http://www.amazon.com/dp/product/B004OVEVP6?tag=priuschatcom-20

This is LCD TV with passive 3D (cheap glasses) you can use all the glasses you bring home from the theater. This is successful model, probably leading the way to the passive (cheap and comfortable) glasses camp.

One day I will replace my 20+ yr old CRT TV with a 3D. I think 3D is the way to go, not sure if I will jump yet on this LG model.

 

I Saw OLEDs back in 00 when Sanyo had their prototype. The thing is about 1mm thick for their 7" display. The PQ looked amazing. After seeing its PQ and how thin it was, I thought for sure OLED would take off. As amazing as it was, the Sanyo rep said that they couldn't get it to last more than a few hundred hours before the brightness started to dim. OLED has no backlight like LCDs.
The next big thing for TV will be 2KX4K. Many TV manufacturers have already demoed 2KX4K TVs this past couple of years. Panasonic showed off their 152" 2KX4K 3D plasma last year at CES. HDMI1.4 spec already supports the 2K res. As resolution gets higher, the 3D quality improves. With such high resolution, you don't need active shutter 3D. Passive polarized 3D with 2K res will surpass the current active shutter 1080P 3D in terms of picture quality, stability and much reduced headaches and dizziness. 2K passive 3D can use cheaper and much more stylish 3D glasses. It'll be no different than wearing lightly tinted sunglasses.Of course you'll still need the proper 3D material to display all its glory.

 

I don't think the guy at CNET was very impressed by this LG TV.

I don't care about 3D at all, but its hard to avoid at the high end (as someone else already noted).

I just ordered a Sony 46XBR929 during a brief price drop. Hope it's not outrageously reflective (replacing a matte screen 40XBR4). I noticed some color shifting if I stood too far off center in the store, but should not be a problem for my living room set-up. Didn't notice any blooming, but the wand bursts in a dark Harry Potter fight scene were quite bright, to the point of being distracting (but maybe they look the same on any other TV).

Good thing I don't care about 3d. The sony 3d gets knocked for having to hold your head straight, any kind of tilting of the head apparently throws it off. And you have to have smoothing set to on, or it flickers. Not sure whether I should care about smoothing or not. Apparently it helps avoid the occasional motion stutter you see on an LCD, but at the cost of throwing off the normal 24 frames per second film cadence. I somehow suspect I would not be able to notice that in normal viewing.

The good news is a 46 inch screen in a smaller overall package than the 40 inch it is replacing. I'm also hoping the higher contrast will be a help to my aging eyes.

 

PS- In addition to the LG 3D TV, I would get the Oppo BDP-93 Blu Ray player

Best Blu Ray Players | Top Picks and Reviews at ConsumerSearch

...but let me tell you, I had records, never got CD player, then got a classic early Pioneer DVD model, and thats all I still have.

 

Just because they make it doesn't mean you should buy it.

 

Emphasis mine.

If I had to choose between having ONLY my Kindle or ONLY a home theater, I'd take the Kindle in a heartbeat. Whether you read books on paper or ebooks, the written word is so much more enjoyable (to me, at least) than any movie.

That said, I'm happy with my HD projector. Yes, I need to turn the room lights off, but since I only use it to watch a movie, not to have mindless television going on full time, I like the darkened room.

 

Well you're an author so you would say that! lol

 

There are limits even to movies filmed in 3D. Even the best 3D today is an illusion, not real 3D. To understand, we need to look at what creates depth. The perception of depth comes from four things: 1) Mechanical perspective, 2) Focal plane, 3) Optical perspective, and 4) Parallax. Let's look at these individually:

1) Mechanical perspective - Objects in the distance look smaller. Parallel lines appear to converge at the horizon.

2) Focal plane - This comes from having a finite depth of field. When we look at an object, our eyes need to focus to see clearly. The focal distance is a function of the physical distance, so we can judge distance from it. Objects nearer or farther than the focal plane appear fuzzy. How fuzzy depends on depth of field. In bright light the depth of field is much larger, allowing objects in a larger range to look clear.

3) Optical perspective - Optical perspective is fuzziness produced by looking through the atmosphere. Objects in the distance appear soft and muted. As an example, mountains in the distance look indistinct and purple or blue. Up close they may look rugged and sharp.

4) Parallax - This is the effect produced by having two eyes viewing the same scene. Each eye sees from a different position, allowing your brain to calculate distance.

In the real world our eyes use all four techniques to estimate depth. In a 2D movie or a painting, three of the four techniques are used. There is only one image, so parallax cannot be used. Optical perspective and mechanical perspective come directly from the image being filmed or painted. Focal plane comes from the camera lens. If the director wishes to emphasize depth, he may use a narrow depth of field, keeping only the subject in focus. A sudden shift in focus will then bring a foreground or background object into focus, shifting the viewer's attention.

3D movies can use all four techniques, but this is where it gets weird and many 3D movies go bad. True 3D movies are filmed with two lenses, providing two views of the same scene. This preserves parallax. However, and this is a big however, the director has no way of determining where the viewer will be looking at any given moment. As the viewer switches his view from one object to another, his field of view should also switch. As the viewer's field of view switches, objects nearer and farther should appear fuzzy due to depth of field. This is how it works in the real world, but it can't work this way in movies. Why? Because the depth of field is set by the camera lens. There can only be one focal point for the camera, but an infinite number of viewers may pick an infinite number of focal points. Something fixed at the time of filming cannot be changed on a per viewer basis at the time of viewing.

The only way around this problem is to film with infinite depth of field. Everything in the scene should be crisp and in focus, allowing each viewer to selectively view any desired object and have it be in focus. Unfortunately, this removes one of the favorite techniques of the cinematographer.

Avatar was held out as a shining example of great 3D. Despite the accolades, Avatar's cinematographer did a lot of focal plane effects, pulling the focus in and out to produce depth like that found in 2D movies. It was very distracting in 3D. I found myself frequently squinting at some fuzzy object, trying to bring it into focus, simply because the cinematographer or director had decided that I would be looking elsewhere.

This is an inherent shortcoming of the two-lens 3D system. It can't be fixed, other than filming in infinite depth of field. Holographic 3D would fix this problem, but sadly that is still a long way off.

Tom

 

That's one of the reasons 3D animated movies are more successful with 3D. For successful stereoscopic 3D movies, the cinematography is different and the camera equipment is very expensive. Look at reviews of two 3D movies that are out now: Puss and Boots vs The Three Musketeers. Reviewers say The Three Musketeers often has scenes that look like paper cut outs. On IMDB, it lists one 3D camera and some 2D cameras....that tells me they reserved the 3D camera system for certain scenes.

Another aspect of a successful 3D movie is that the cinematographer takes focal depth into account. I saw a presentation from the animators of Monsters vs Aliens: one of the first 3D animated movies to be composed entirely in 3D (all the 3D software and video compositing software were previewed in stereoscopic 3D while the film was being created). One of the important aspects they mentioned was that you can't just cut from one scene to another. If you cut from a close up (relatively short length) to a long shot, that can contribute to eye fatigue. What 3D animators can do (which is not possible with an optical system) is to gradually change the depth after the scene.

As for 3D in consumer applications...I think they're best with gaming (going back to no optical distortions) and medical visualization. One thing I was surprised to discover was that robotic surgery is usually done without hepatic support (instead the surgeon is seeing the surgical field in 3D HD). With films, I prefer the passive glasses best. Since they're polarized glasses, they do dim the image...but at least it is much better then the anaglyph system (where all you would be seeing is red and cyan). If it weren't expensive, I might invest in 3D for Pixar movies....but it's not a feature that makes me want to upgrade my own TV. I saw Avatar in 3D in the theaters: it was good that Cameron didn't have cheesy scenes where there's effects going right in your face....but in the same time, it still looks great on my HDTV with regular blu ray. I honestly find having a good surround system is more immersive then stereoscopic 3D.

 

I'll take it as a compliment that my writing is so good you imagine me to be an author. I have actually written some stuff. But I can count on one hand the pieces I've had published: A couple of poems, for which I received one free copy of the magazine each appeared in, a couple of technical articles on programming the Hercules Monochrome Graphics card in the C language, and a humorous article in a ham radio magazine concerning the imagined use of morse code throughout Beethoven's fifth symphony. (It does use the morse code for the letter V, but my article listed and commented on every pattern that could be taken as a morse code letter.) I was paid $50 each for the articles on programming the graphics card. If that makes me an author, good on me. But you can't find anything I've written in a book store.

I did at one time have an impressive collection of rejection notes.

I agree with everything you say. But good 3-D is still spectacular.

 

I like CNET too. But they definitely give mediocre ratings to great products sometimes. You will note CNET did not rate the LG 55LW6500 I mentioned, but they did give a ho-hum rating to the next model down (LG 55LW5600). However, note the excellent CNET consumer ratings for both models are in obvious conflict with the CNET guy. I have aging eyes too and of course thinking our little visitors may get a kick out of 3D. For 3D I think you need to go up a size to 55-in for me, otherwise 42-47 inch would be good enough.

 

If you want to see something in 3-D just open your eyes and look around.

 

A good 3D film with good surround sound system and properly decoded D-BOX = ultimate home movie experience.

 

Yeah but I wanna see Ashley Green 2 feet in front of me.