The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr reports on an apparent ugly side effect of the generally ugly trend that is “3D”: movie theaters leaving 3D lenses on projectors even when they’re showing 2D movies, thereby robbing the films of sufficient light and leaving them dim and lifeless. Yet another reason to hope that 3D is a fad and that it goes away…
Tag Archives | 3D
No 3D for He, See?
TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner is even less impressed with 3D movies and TV than I am. Actually, he says they’re a scam.
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3D: Case Closed!
Roger Ebert gets a fascinating, cogent, passionately anti-3D letter from film-editing legend Walter Murch and concludes that it closes the case on 3D movies. I tend to agree…
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3D Smartphones Don't Make Much Sense
On a quiet island within Sharp’s CES booth, a handful of glasses-free 3D smartphones were on display. They had eye-catching layered menus, 3D conversion of standard photos and a cute demo of swimming fish. (Rule of thumb: every 3D demo involves sea animals at some point.)
It only took a few minutes of playing around to see how undesirable all this 3D could be.
On tbe most obvious level, staring at a glasses-free 3D screen for a prolonged period can have a dizzying effect, but not all 3D is created equal, and maybe Sharp’s implementation is sub-par. My real concern is that smartphones aren’t conducive to 3D content in the first place.
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Sony to Fight Off 3D Skepticism
The skeptics are wrong about 3D technology, said Sony CEO Howard Stringer, as he unveiled a far-reaching Sony roadmap for 3D “without or without glasses” across TVs, PlayStations, Blu-ray players, displays, movies, camcorders, and more.
Consumers will start to really buy into 3D technology whenever their favorite TV shows start showing up in 3D, he predicted, during a CES press conference.
Stringer contended that if anyone can convert the 3D naysayers, it’s Sony, with the company’s huge presence in the entertainment, hardware, and software industries.
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CES 2011: Toshiba's Glasses-Free 3D
When it comes to 3D, I’m pretty much a worst-case scenario. I bristle at the fact that I’m expected to wear ill-fitting glasses over my regular glasses. I’ve sampled multiple 3D technologies and found all of them wanting. It all seems like a lot of expense and effort for very little benefit.
But I am sort of intrigued by 3D that doesn’t require glasses. And at a pre-CES party tonight here in Las Vegas, Toshiba was showing a l56-inch flat-screen TV and a laptop which do 3D, no funny goggles required. The two devices use lenticular displays, just like the little picture of Pinocchio I owned when I was three. (Lenticular video screens are also nothing new, though all the ones I’ve seen until now have been blurry and unappealing.)
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I Like My 2D Disney in 2D, Please
I love Disney animation and therefore hate the idea of converting 2D Disney animated features into faux 3D movies.
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Shoot Your Own 3D
Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Fujifilm Real 3D W3
Price: $499.99
I’m not sure if the world is ready to start taking photos in 3D, but Fujifilm sure came up with an attractive was to do it. The FinePix Real 3D W3 digital camera is the first compact consumer 3D digital camera capable of capturing both 3D still images and HD 3D movies at 720P resolution, thanks to its dual-CCD, dual lens system. You can view 3D photos and movies on the W3’s autostereoscopic widescreen display–no glasses required–and the HDMI output port lets you connect the camera to 3D TVs. Other features include Advanced 2D Mode, which takes advantage of the dual CCD/dual lens system to capture two different 2D images at the same time–zoom and wide angle, for instance, or two different sensitivity settings.
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Rule One: Don’t Mess With How People Do Things
Recently, I drove a Mini Cooper for the first time. (Rented from Zipcar for $13/hour. Not bad.)
That’s not news, obviously. They’ve been around forever. But it taught me something very important about product design: It’s really hard–and aggravating–for us consumers if you mess with our way of doing things.
For example, it took me several minutes to figure out how to put the window up. Nothing on the door, where I would first expect it. Nothing on the center console, my second choice. Finally, I found a barely labeled button near the radio controls. I had similar trouble trying to put the seat back to get luggage in the rear of the car. The levers weren’t where they are in every other car I’ve driven.
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Oakley’s New Gascans: 3D That Might Actually Be Good
When I heard that sports eyewear maker Oakley was going to start making 3D glasses, I thought to myself “That’s nice–I’ll bet they’re sticking generic 3D lenses in a set of stylish frames.” Wrong! The company’s new 3D Gascans are mostly about the quality of the optics. The company came up with its own technology for making high-quality 3D, curved lenses–the cheapo glasses you use at movies have really flat lenses. And in a demo Oakley showed to me, its lenses were capable of showing far crisper images than others.
Oakley’s lenses are for passive 3D system, including most movie-theater 3D. Most of the first wave of 3D HDTVs, as well as many 3D PC display and laptops, use active 3D–the kind with battery-powered glasses that flutter LCDs in each lens on and off. Oakley’s glasses won’t work with these devices. But when I spoke about the 3D Gascans with Oakley CEO Colin Baden, he told me that he thinks passive-3D–which involves a fancier TV but simpler glasses such as the Gascans–will dominate over the long run.