samsung 3D Tv
Today I’m invited at the launch of the 3D tv in Brussels. I’m live blogging from the event.
To start we have Bruno Tassert, product manager at Samsung. He’s giving a product overview of the 3D collection of Samsung. It started in the eighties but with the clumsy glasses in cardboard it was not a real success. Until the film avatar last year 3D stayed without success. Today 3D is possible because the technology permits it. The movie studios have adopted the technology and now it’s time for the consumer to use 3D in their own homes.
3D is basically two images who are projected next to each other. At first in 2 different colors but now the technology has evolved and uses different polarities in the glasses, this is the way it is used by the movie theaters, it’s passive. The tech used in the in the samsung tv is with an active component in the glasses. One side is just shown on TV the other one is shown and filtered by the glasses. This technology uses 200mhz. This is called the shutter technique. The last way is like the photos in 3D which has the big disadvantage that you can’t look at it from a side and the 2D experience really sucks. Although they all have their disadvantages, the shutter technique is the only one that makes it possible to show HD content.
As you would expect you can put the 2 different images side by side or on top of each other. Now we are getting in to the really technical stuff, so I’m just going to skip that part if you want more info about it, you can search for it yourself on the Internet.
You have to choose for Samsung, according to them because they launched 3D as first and have all the other devices ready for it. But the most important reason is because they use conversion by object based depth processing, while the other ways of 3D just separate the objects in a vertical direction.
For 3D you only need a television, a blue Ray player and off course the glasses. There are 3 different types at the moment, ranging from 2000 to 5000+ euro for the LCD and LED. But they also have plasma. Next to that they also have the blue Ray player and the 3D home cinema. The glasses range from 79 euro for the children glasses and going up to 99 euro for the adult version. There are 2 sizes in adult sizes, because not everybody has the same face.
The content is available from movies, games like avatar which we can test here and there are a couple of channels that start their emissions in 3D
Now we arrive at the real history of 3D, in 1857 the first real 3D machine was build, in the 1950′s there were already about 60 movies released in 3D, but it was a real PITA to watch a full length movie. In the sixties they tried some 3D in color but it still didn’t work, after another try with Jaws they left the idea for a while. The first real 3D were the Imax movies in theme parks. That worked but it was very expensive and time consuming to make Imax movies. We had to wait till this century before they started to do some new things in 3D, where they started again with animation films and the real breakthrough was reached last summer with the release of several 3D movies.
Now we get a overview of what they showed in the Belgian pavilion
In 2005 they 5 biggest directors in Hollywood announced at DLP that 3D would be the future for the movies because that way it was almost impossible to pirate. Philips started with a project for 3D without glasses but had to stop production because it was too heavy, big and there was not enough quality.
There are apparently 2 different ways of filming, one is crossing the cameras, that’s what is used by Cameron in Avatar. The other way is, like it’s mainly used in Europe is by aligning the cameras parrallel which makes the images pop more. But on infinity it everything is in focus.
Now we have something to eat and will all participate in a quiz later on. My opinion on the whole experience I’ll post later with some pictures. Stay tuned.
