CEATEC Showgoers Brave Long Waits to View Toshiba Glasses-Free 3D TVs

MAKUHARI, Japan -- Wait times averaged two hours or more Tuesday on the opening morning of the CEATEC Japan show for those seeking a peek at Toshiba’s newly introduced “glasses-less” 3D LCD TVs, which go on sale late December in the Japanese market (CED Oct 5 p1). Toshiba officials at the company’s CEATEC stand remained steadfast in their insistence that there are no plans to sell the technology in the U.S. or Europe.

But Toshiba won’t rule out a CES showcasing of the 56-inch working prototype it’s demonstrating this week at CEATEC, though the company will go to market in Japan only with the 12- and 20-inch models it announced Monday, spokeswoman Kaori Hiraki told us. She said Toshiba’s attention has been focused on getting ready for CEATEC, and serious planning for the Las Vegas show hasn’t yet started.

Contrary to published reports, only the 20-inch model will use the Cell processor, not the 12-inch, Hiraki said. Cell also is built into the 56-inch prototype, she said. The powerful Cell, which Toshiba developed with IBM and Sony, is the brain of the PS3 and helps explain why that console is the only existing example of Blu-ray hardware that can be upgradable for Blu-ray 3D through a firmware update. Cell also helps explain why the 20-inch Toshiba set is expected to sell for double the cost of the 12-inch -- 240,000 yen vs. 120,000 yen, Hiraki said. Asked what Cell will bring to the 20-inch set that the 12-inch model will lack, Hiraki said “more precise image processing.” Toshiba expects to sell 1,000 units each of the 12- and 20-inch in the average month, she said. Toshiba thinks the 20-inch TV will find a home among avid gamers, while the 12-inch model is a product that’s well-suited to a kitchen or a study, she said.

CEATEC showgoers who braved the long lines at the Toshiba stand were led into a confined space inside a theater where the sets were running continuous nature videos rather than demonstrated in a formal presentation. The tight layout made it difficult for us to judge the sets’ picture quality when viewed from wide angles to the left or right. The 20-inch set is best viewed dead center from a distance of about 35 inches, Toshiba said. For the 12-inch, the best viewing distance is about 25 inches, it said. Hiraki said Toshiba has no specific recommended viewing distance on the 56-inch model because it’s only a prototype. Toshiba has touted the sets it’s bringing to market as giving “precise rendering of high-quality 3D images whatever the viewing angle within the viewing zone.” Outside that zone, “images may not be seen in 3D, in whole or in part,” Toshiba said. When we asked him to define that zone, Goh Itoh, leader of the multimedia lab at Toshiba’s Corporate Research and Development Center in Kawasaki, Japan, that helped developed the product told us Toshiba recommends it’s within 15 degrees of center in either direction.

The 12- and 20-inch models use LCD panels sourced from Toshiba Mobile Display, Hiraki said. Toshiba lacks the internal capability for larger-screen LCD panels, and so had to go to an outside supplier to custom-build the 56-inch prototype shown at CEATEC. She wouldn’t name the supplier. In April, Toshiba Mobile Display announced it had developed a 21-inch glasses-free 3D display that uses an “integral imaging system to reproduce a real object as a 3D image that can be viewed without glasses over a wide range of viewing angles.” Its nine-parallax design results in a stereoscopic image that “is natural and smooth,” the subsidiary said then. Secret to the design is a “lenticular sheet” that’s semicircular in shape and is an array of lenses that transmits images in a horizontal plane, Toshiba said. The sheet helps “realize precise rendering and natural, high-quality 3D images,” it said.

Besides the novelty of delivering 3D without glasses, the new sets are also a model of eco-friendly design, Toshiba said. For example, their LED backlights are free of mercury, and all components comprised of more than 25 grams of plastic have been derived from corn-based polyactic resin and are therefore biodegradable, it said. The sets also are RoHS-compliant and meet the standards of Japan’s J-Moss rules on hazardous materials, it said.