Passive 3D TVs Coming in 2011, According to 3ality Digital Execs, and They ‘Look Great’

ORLANDO, Fla. -- 3D TVs with passive 3D glasses and the evolution of standards will mark 3D TV’s sophomore year, said executives from content creation company 3ality we spoke with at the 3D Vendor Testing Event at ESPN Wide World of Sports. “You'll start to see some consumer-priced passive models at CES” or “soon after,” said Steve Schklair, CEO of 3ality Digital Systems. And in contrast to previous conventional wisdom that passive 3D technology is inferior in performance and more expensive to produce, Schklair said, new technologies have overcome previous issues. “I've seen them, they look great, and they only add pennies to the manufacturing cost,” he said. He said the industry keeps talking about a standard for 3D active glasses, but “the easiest way to create a standard is to get rid of the process altogether."

LG Electronics is rumored to be one company with plans for passive 3D in the coming year. The company has shipped 15,000 polarizer filter-type 3D TVs to Sky in the U.K. (CED Nov 30 p1), according to DisplaySearch. LG spokesman John Taylor said the company has passive 3D TVs for commercial use in bars and hotels, “where it makes sense to use $10 glasses versus $100 glasses.” He noted that the company’s current line of consumer 3D TVs in the U.S. uses active glasses, but he wouldn’t confirm or deny reports that the company will come out with passive TVs next year. A Vizio spokesman wouldn’t disclose upcoming CES announcements, but he noted that the company showed a 65-inch passive 3D TV at CEA Line Shows this year.

Howard Postley, chief technology officer of 3ality, referred to some of the coming models as “hybrids” because “they're passive to the consumer, but they're active internally.” Conventional passive 3D TVs have required a polarizer film on the glass, he said, and they display the image by alternating lines -- with even lines “spinning one way and odd lines spinning the other.” The upcoming hybrids, he said, don’t put the shutter technology in the glasses but instead “on the front of the TV, or in the glass of the TV, where the image on the LCD is changing but there’s an active polarizer in front that’s changing orientation at the same frequency.” The image goes clockwise for one eye and counterclockwise for the other, he said. “What you see in the glasses is a passive image because the light is coming down in the same way that it works for passives."

Postley, who’s also vice chair of the 3D@Home Consortium, an industry group with a mission to develop guidelines for the storage, transmission and distribution of 3D content, said getting quality content out to consumers from the beginning is crucial to the success of 3D in homes. The consortium is behind a “minimum set of technical standards for what’s comfortable and not comfortable to watch,” he said, saying many standards will be derived de facto. Schklair said standards need to deal with matter including how much vertical and horizontal deviation can be in an image, color and density matching between left and right eye images, and mismatched geometries, so there’s no major deviation in depth across edits “causing people’s eyes to snap around in the sockets."

"We stand behind the need for high-quality 3D images, especially now,” Schklair said, since consumers will base their opinion of 3D on their first impression. Without standards to set guidelines for transmission and compression, he said, “people won’t be able to make the distinction between why one 3D program is difficult to watch” and another is not “and will then conclude that all 3D programs must be difficult to watch.” With that in mind, he said, “we have to be very careful what the industry comes to market with."

Postley said the quality of 3D will go up as the hardware improves over time, but he doesn’t expect a “fundamental change to what can be done.” He quoted CEA President Gary Shapiro, who when HDTV was in its infancy said, “This is the worst HD we're ever going to see.” Postley said today’s 3D broadcasts are “the worst 3D” that will be seen. The 3D content will get better, the experience will get better and people will get better at producing it, he said, “but I don’t think you're going to see a radically different 3D or signal.”