Monday March 8, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin
"-ready" – the scariest hyphenate in consumer electronics – is beginning to be indiscriminately slapped to the rear of "3DTV," officially opening the 3DTV obfuscation season. Or, as Elmer Fudd would put it, it's "3D-weady season," which somehow sounds more appropriate.
The "-ready" suffix should be familiar to most folks in the CE business. A decade ago, a burst of alleged HDTVs were confusingly labeled "HDTV-ready," a suffix everyone agreed didn’t mean, forcing the powers-that-be to precisely define "full" HDTV and ordered that HDTVs thus be labeled accurately.
As was the case with HDTV, the term "3D-ready" not only (and still) doesn't mean anything, it further muddies what is already confusing consumers about 3D. It also makes it twice as hard for those of us who have to try and explain all this when we first are forced staunch the misinformation hemorrhage.
It's really rather simple. Right now, there is only full HD 3D, which creates a 1080i frame for each eye. Full 3D HDTV can be achieved only with a 3D HDTV (not "ready" or "capable" or any other non-instructive descriptive suffix) equipped with HDMI 1.4 connectivity, connected to a 3D Blu-ray player with content encoded in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 MVC (multiview video codec) and similarly equipped with HDMI 1.4. At some point, there may be half resolution 3D for firmware upgraded legacy HDMI 1.3 devices such as cable and satellite boxes, but none of these products or capabilities are on the immediate horizon and have nothing to do with the relative readiness of a 3D HDTV.
To watch this full 3D HDTV, consumers will need to wear active shutter glasses.
3DTV can be simplified further for consumers by removing all alphanumeric acronyms. All they need to know is: 3D HDTV + 3D Blu-ray + glasses = Avatar @home.
But as with HDTV, manufacturers and retailers seem to take a Looney Tunes approach to mis-explain their high-tech wares.
Take, for example, an email sent out to the media by a national retailer who shall remain nameless (okay, it was Sears) to announce the availability of two Samsung 3D LED LCDs and helpfully dispel three self-proclaimed 3D myths:
- Users are required to wear 3D glasses all the time. Yes, Panasonsungshiba, spend millions of dollars on advertising and marketing to let people know they can take off their 3D glasses when they're not watching 3D TV. Thanks, because I'm still wearing mine from when I watched Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" 3D video on the Grammys telecast last month.
- After watching 3D and taking off the glasses, regular TV content is going to be fuzzy. Millions worldwide have collectively spent hundreds of millions to watch Avatar in 3D, and not a single one of these Na'vi nerds found the world fuzzy after removing their 3D glasses. Blue, maybe, but not fuzzy.
- 3D TVs are going to be too expensive for the average household. This is not a "myth," it's reality. Many homes don't have a large screen HDTV for a good reason: even at $1,000, 42-plus inch HDTVs are too expensive for most, and 3D sets are going to be at the top end of the large screen pricing scale (the cheapest Samsung set on the Sears' site, a 46-inch model, is $2,600). And considering the hardships the economy is causing, trying to convince Mr. and Mrs. America that 3D HDTVs actually represent a good buy is, quite frankly, just plain insulting.
Worse, the Sears' Samsung 3D HDTV product page, consumers' first introduction to actual 3D HDTV sales spiel, mentions nothing about 3D glasses – not where to get them, not how much they cost, not that they have to be $100 active shutter glasses not cheap cardboard red-green glasses for anaglyph 3D or the Polarized sunglasses they snuck out with from the movie theater – not even that they'll need glasses. Imagine the first automobile salesmen neglecting to mention buyers would need to buy something called "gasoline."
Then there's Sears' "Making 3D Happen" FAQ page. First, there are headers for "Native 3D," "Virtual 3D" and "2D." "Native 3D"? "Virtual 3D"? I've been writing about 3D for more than a year, attending 3D demos and conducting intense Q&As with industry execs over the last few weeks, and I've never heard these terms. And I've not seen a single 2D-to-3D conversion that improved upon century-old stereoscopic postcard viewer.
And the first product descriptive term Sears' FAQ uses? "3D-ready HDTV."
Cue Elmer.
