3DTV Reviewer – 3DTV Reviews And Buying Guides

Archive for the ‘3D Glasses’ Category

LG have announced that their rechargeable AG-S100 3D glasses are now available at shops across the UK for £99.99.

Unlike the slightly less expensive battery-powered 3D active shutter glasses, this model from LG can be recharged using a USB port. On a full recharge you’ll get 40 hours of wireless viewing from them. Of course, the LG AG-S100 work with LG’s 3DTV’s, at the moment the LX9xxx and LX6xxx models.

The AG-S100 glasses synchronise with an emitter built into the LG 3DTV so that each side of the glasses alternately darkens for a fraction of a second to give each eye a different image which, when combined by your brain, creates the 3D effect at the full High Definition of 1080p.

The current best price for the AG-S100 3D glasses, that we could find, was £99.99 per pair from the Dixons Group (PC World, Dixons, Curry’s). Click here for full details, latest pricing and availability.

OK, I don’t get this. Can someone explain to me why each 3DTV manufacturer’s 3D glasses are incompatible with each other, apart from the obvious profit motive?

Let’s say you buy a 3DTV from Sony, with Sony’s 3D glasses. If your mate invites you to watch the 3D footie on his Samsung 3DTV, you can’t use your Sony 3D specs. The same goes, as far as I know, for Panasonic, Nvidia, LG and everyone else.

Now, here’s the thing… the same 3D signal is being displayed on each 3DTV, right? It doesn’t matter if it’s Sky’s 3D channel, a Blu Ray 3D, a PS3 game in 3D or anything else… each 3DTV will be able to display it. So the shenanigans happens when the TV sends the signal to the glasses, right? So have the manufacturers deliberately engineered their glasses to be incompatible with other sets?

So, here’s my question… will someone be able to create a “universal” pair of 3D glasses, like a “universal” remote control? Is anyone talking about this yet? If so, let me know. It’s going to be a huge market!

3D Panasonic Glasses TY-EW3D10

The Panasonic 3D plasma Viera TV’s come with two sets of 3D glasses, but if you need more, the model number is TY-EW3D10, and they’ll set you back £100 per pair. Don’t sit on them!

There are many different versions of 3d glasses, from the very cheap, disposable, paper ones that most people think of wearing to watch 3D movies in the 1980′s and 1990′s and special effects in magazines, to the much more sophisticated LCD shutter glassed for 3-D HDTV which are favoured by the likes of Sony and Panasonic for their LCD screens. The reason the LCD glasses are more expensive is that they recieve a signal from the TV set to synchronise with before they alternately darken each side of the glasses so that you actually “see” a series of images through your left and right eyes which your brain stitches together into a 3D image.

The cheaper glasses, with the red side and blue side, don’t use the same effect. Instead, all the information for a 3-D image is contained in the picture itself, which is called an anaglyph. Your eyes “see” two different images because of the differently coloured filters, and the brain interprets the coherent image as 3-D. Relying on colour filters naturally means that the overall colour of the 3D image suffers. Another way to achieve the same effect is to make use a light with different polarity so that when using polarised glasses, the left eye sees an image with one polarity and the right eye sees a different image with different polarity. You brain constructs a 3D image from the two separate images but with no loss of colour.

So which is best? Well, for the purposes of 3D TV and gaming, you’ll probably need a set of LCD shutter glasses as Sony and Panasonic are marketing TV sets requiring those glasses. For the cinema, it will depend on how the movie was filmed, and you may need different glasses for different movies until a standard is agreed, or one format becomes dominant. At the moment, companies like RealD and MasterImage make the polarised glasses, and XpanD make LCD glasses. Dolby also makes their own type of glasses for their 3-D Digital Cinema system!