Viewsonic Demos Budget-Priced 3D Gear Due to Ship Soon

LONDON -- Viewsonic gave Consumer Electronics Daily hands-on demos of a new bundle of products that let novices make and play 3D movies at budget cost. Viewsonic previewed some of the products at IFA in Berlin, and showed us a full working kit last week, a few weeks ahead of worldwide shipping.

Three basic components are sold separately but work hand in hand. They're the V3D241 3D, a 24-inch LED-backlit 3D monitor costing about $530, the 3DV5-E 3D DV camcorder costing about $240, and the similarly priced 3DPF8-E, an eight-inch autostereoscopic, no-glasses 3D digital photo frame with a built-in battery. The camcorder captures HD movies in 2D or 3D at 720p, or 5-megapixel stills, on an SD card. A built-in 2.4-inch autostereoscopic no-glasses viewfinder previews and plays in 2D or 3D. The captured footage can be shown in 2D or 3D on the 24-inch full HD monitor. Onscreen, 3D is displayed in one of two ways -- as red and blue anaglyph or as Nvidia frame-sequential images at 120 Hz for viewing with shutter glasses. The monitor comes with one pair of shutter glasses. The captured footage also can be shown in 2D or 3D on the eight-inch touch-screen photo frame.

We sampled the camcorder and found the quality through the 2.4-inch 3D viewfinder coarse but certainly useful as a way to judge 3D depth while shooting stills or video. 3D video on the photo frame looked noticeably better than stills, because motion disguised the loss of resolution caused by the lenticular screen. The 3D effect held reasonably steady over a 40-degree viewing angle, 20 degrees to the left or right of center, and the viewing angle in the vertical plane was plus or minus 25 degrees. When the same footage was played from the memory card through a PC on the 24-inch monitor, the pictures, as expected, looked even better, especially when used in sequential mode and viewed with shutter glasses. The monitor and frame also show normal 2D.

Viewsonic at the briefing had only a few early working samples to demonstrate. Both the camcorder and photo frame periodically failed to respond to push-button or touch-screen commands. The Vista PC driving the 3D monitor had to be re-booted twice during the demo. All this will be fixed in the products on sale, assures Viewsonic.