Yet Another Consumer Hosing: 3DTV

By Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker

Let me guess – you were one of the fools who bought a HD TV this Christmas.

Well, I didn’t, even though I have a couple of older sets around the house that I might want to upgrade.

Why not?

Just bought a new flat-panel HDTV for Christmas? Enjoying that new Blu-ray disc player? Guess what? They’re already obsolete. Everything may be going 3D.

That’s why.

This article, by the way, is full of misinformation, such as this:

The glasses aren’t like the cardboard goggles that cost less than a dollar and are used in most theaters. That approach lowers the picture resolution of a home movie, and thus reduces the image sharpness.

No it doesn’t – that’s a bald-face piece of bovine excrement.  The "Real-3D" technology used for most modern 3D movies relies on the polarization of the light to work.  The theater’s projector (DLP only here!) projects two images at "double frame rate" and a polarization filter is placed in front of the DLP array.  That filter can switch to emit either right or left circular-polarized light.

The lens in your 3D glasses contain one lens that blocks right-circular polarization light, and other one blocks left.

The polarization filter at the projector is synchronized to the DLP and thus the system emits a "left" and then a "right" frame for each frame in sequence.  The entire active portion of the system is at the projector and thus the required "glasses" are $1 items, containing only a passive and inexpensive plastic circular polarization filter.  This scheme causes a minor amount of visible light output drop (since light that "scatters" improperly from the screen is blocked) which is compensated for by cranking up the light source’s output a bit.

Now you know how the theater system works.

Here’s the ugly:

This technology will only work with something that can polarize the light output, which in the consumer space means a DLP or LCD projection set – that is, something that is effectively similar to what is in the "digital theater" in terms of how it works.  You need an image source that projects a beam of light into which you can insert the polarization filter, and the DLP or LCD system has to have a high enough frame rate for it to be able to emit two frames in the time that formerly emitted one (e.g. 240hz)

Flat-panel displays of any sort are incapable of producing light with the requisite polarization.  (While you could probably put a filter of the necessary size in front of a flat panel the cost and damage to light output that it would produce makes such an approach prohibitive.)

Therefore the TV makers are trying to "agree" on a standard that requires active shutters in the lenses.  But those things are expensive (~$50/pair), will be somewhat fragile (which they love of course since they will be able to sell you more of them when you break one!) and will require batteries, as they must pick up on a synchronization signal in the picture to be able to time the shutter action to the display.

Notice that this article was published today – and not on Thanksgiving. 

Gee, I wonder why?  There’s nothing like screwing the consumer, right?  Get him to buy a nice expensive TV set and/or Blu-Ray player for the holidays and then "oops – you have to buy it again if you want this fancy content."

I smelled this one coming….. it is just another in a long line of "information manipulation" in terms of what "industry" bothers to tell you, the consumer – and when.

Say thanks to all the consumer products makers as you bend over (again) for their bit of misdirection, never mind the adoption of a technical standard that is designed to favor certain manufacturing techniques at your expense, when the alternative – a polarizing filter exactly as is used in the theaters – is just as viable and puts the expense of the system in one place – in the TV – rather than in a forced purchase for everyone who wants to be in the room when the damn set is on!

If you’re smart you will "reward" this little bit of intentional withholding of information from you until after Christmas by refusing to buy products from these companies.

All of them.

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