Kasper Connections

3D TV for your Home Theater System

Wow it seems like just yesterday we were talking about the future of using 3D TV in Home Theater Systems with our customers.  It’s hard to believe time has flown by so fast.  Well today I just saw the latest Samsung 3D TV the LN55C7000 an HD 1080p TV at 120hz.  It was amazing!  I had recently seen Avatar in the theaters and the first thing I noticed was this is much sharper and more vivid.  The reason  the new 3D TV’s are so much better than the movie theaters are they use an active method of giving you 3D TV. 

The 3D glasses you wear are called shutter glasses.  They have to be made to work with the particular manufacture of TV you are watching.   What happens is they have small shutters inside the lenses that open and close at 60 hz. Or 60 times per second.  So your HD shutter glasses are being opened and closed for you in a sense at the same time the two images on the screen are alternating.   So the glasses you wear actually have a little power button.  As you watch the show the TV sends ir signals to your glasses just like a remote sends signals to a TV to power it on.   This communication to the shutter glasses times the alternating shutters to correspond with the images on the TV.  This active shutter technology gives the viewer a much crisper and clearer image. 

I was watching a demo of monster vs. aliens and it was awesome.  I was standing about 4 ft away and at one point the main character was using a paddle ball.  The paddle ball popped right out at me so fast I actually jumped.   At points I started to walk around the room to see what the experience would be if I was further away and from the sides.   As I walked back it actually got neater, obviously because I was not standing so close to the 3D TV my entire vision was not the TV, but the parts of the image that came out of the TV at me came further out because there was more room for the image to extend.  Things really seemed to float in the air.   All I can say is WOW!   As I moved to the side I noticed people almost crawled out at one point it seemed like one of the characters was peering out of the TV.  But once I got to far over the image started to lose the 3D effect.  Keep in mind I was fairly far over, further than most people would be watching their TV’s from.    All in all my feeling is if you are in the process of buying a new HDTV for your Home Theater System I would highly recommend paying a little extra for the ability to watch things in 3D.   

Some TV’s will upscale existing content to 3D. This is not quite the same effect as when content is filmed and displayed by a 3D Blu-ray player.   In the up scaling the image will seem to have 3D depth back into the TV, which is really cool, but images do not come out at the viewer past the 3D TV.  We will be talking soon about the requirements, available and upcoming 3D content, and various 3D TV’s in the near future.  If you have a question as always we love to hear from you.  

Until then I’ll leave you with one last parting thought.  Can you imagine playing Wii in 3D?