3D Gaming*

I'm not touching 3D gaming in my living room until they come out with a new HDMI spec, standardize the glasses and standardize the way 3D content is recorded. Right now you can calibrate your tv, but only for 2D content. For 3D you're stuck with guesswork. And having tinted glasses affects both brightness and colour, so I've decided not to touch it until its ready. Also the quality of 3D varies greatly by tv, and I've heard Panasonic is the best. RobertR1 could probably correct me if I'm wrong on that. Other big brands are lagging significantly.
 
I'm not touching 3D gaming in my living room until they come out with a new HDMI spec, standardize the glasses and standardize the way 3D content is recorded. Right now you can calibrate your tv, but only for 2D content. For 3D you're stuck with guesswork. And having tinted glasses affects both brightness and colour, so I've decided not to touch it until its ready. Also the quality of 3D varies greatly by tv, and I've heard Panasonic is the best. RobertR1 could probably correct me if I'm wrong on that. Other big brands are lagging significantly.

What's wrong with hdmi 1.4(a) ? Is blu-ray 3d not a industry standard for video? The glasses thing should get sorted out once we are out of early adapter phase.
 
Yap, Blu-ray 3D has standardized 3D video playback over HDMI. The spec is also free for other I/O interfaces (e.g., Display Port ?) to adopt. Any 3DTV and 3D projectors can work with the spec.

3D glasses are incompatible because their left and right shutters have been reversed. You have to wear the Samsung one upside down to see a Panasonic 3D screen. I suspect they can upgrade the TV firmware to support each other's glasses. Need to wait for the manufacturers to confirm.
 
1080p 60fps per eye needs HDMI 1.5, I believe, and you know it'll be coming. Is it necessary? We'll see next gen. I'm not going to be an early adopter on a $2500-5000 tv. It's one thing to be an early adopter on a $500 console, and another to spend thousands on a tv that gets outdated like 720p HDTV sets and some projection technologies did.

As for playback, there are standards, but my understanding is that the way 3D content, like video, is recorded varies greatly, which means calibration is absolutely impossible right now. Colour accuracy, brightness and contrast are out the window. You can calibrate your tv because you know content is created to a specific standard. This is my understanding of the situation.

As for the tvs themselves, it's early and some companies have grasped the tech much better than others. Some implement 3D in less than desirable quality. I'll wait until things are more solid.

As for the glasses themselves, not being standard, being very expensive, reducing brightness and distorting colour, I just can't see why I'd want it. It does bring some benefit to games, but even then you'll get much better image quality in 2D. For movies etc, 2D is the way to go.
 
I think many will go for 3D Monitor.

40" 3DTV from Sony is $2000. Entry price will continue to drop next year.

I don't think many consumers calibrate their 2D TVs. So it should not be an issue for 3DTV. If I find a content too bright, I can always tone it down myself.

The key thing is to have compelling 3DTV content, and a good viewing experience (no fatique).
 
1080p 60fps per eye needs HDMI 1.5, I believe, and you know it'll be coming. Is it necessary? We'll see next gen. I'm not going to be an early adopter on a $2500-5000 tv. It's one thing to be an early adopter on a $500 console, and another to spend thousands on a tv that gets outdated like 720p HDTV sets and some projection technologies did.
.

I think hdmi1.4a supports 1080p60 3d but it is optional so devices can choose to not implement it. I doubt many next gen games will be rendering in that resolution though. My money would be on 720p60 or 1080i60 3d resolutions. Devs will most likely choose fancy effects over resolution. And as we already have seen using 30fps for 3d is Not a good idea.

edit. On the same note i wouldn't be too surprised to see some next gen 2d 720p30 games as some devs will most likely want to push visuals as far as they can go (and upscaling to 1080p might not be such a bad solution)
 
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I don't think many consumers calibrate their 2D TVs. So it should not be an issue for 3DTV. If I find a content too bright, I can always tone it down myself.
I think you missed Scott's sentiments. He will not be getting a 3D TV because he will not be able to calibrate and that's something he wants. At no point was he suggesting that the masses will boycott 3D because they can't get proper colour calibration and a 4% green shift due to the LCD specs drives them nuts! ;)

That's actually a good point I hadn't cnosidered. Calibration for 3D viewing will be different to 2D viewing, and while switching between content colours will get messed, unless the TV has separate settings for 2D and 3D. Calibrating systems would need to have a colour transmission test for the glasses and offset the display colours accordingly. I'm not that fussed about proper calibration myself, changing things until I think they look right, though I do hate when people have the wrong display mode and colours or aspect are completely screwy, and yet they're happy with it!
 
I think you missed Scott's sentiments. He will not be getting a 3D TV because he will not be able to calibrate and that's something he wants. At no point was he suggesting that the masses will boycott 3D because they can't get proper colour calibration and a 4% green shift due to the LCD specs drives them nuts! ;)

I don't understand where the problem is. Blu-ray 3d is as standardized as dvd or 2d blu-ray. Calibrate for those and everything works as it used to. If the problem is 3d broadcasts then you would have similar problems for 2d broadcasts already and nothing would change. If the problem is your own content then you need to look into the mirror and calibrate&edit content properly and still your neighbours vacation videos can be off.

For games we are already seeing game specific calibration screens and I doubt anything will change for 3d on that front.
That's actually a good point I hadn't cnosidered. Calibration for 3D viewing will be different to 2D viewing, and while switching between content colours will get messed, unless the TV has separate settings for 2D and 3D. Calibrating systems would need to have a colour transmission test for the glasses and offset the display colours accordingly. I'm not that fussed about proper calibration myself, changing things until I think they look right, though I do hate when people have the wrong display mode and colours or aspect are completely screwy, and yet they're happy with it!

In theory only the brightness should be affected(halved). This should be easily solvable with 1 parameter that is changed when switching between 2d/3d mode. If this really is a problem it shouldn't be that difficult to have 2 different settings in tv that are switched when mode is changed. After all many tv's already have input specific settings and this is just a simple extension to that functionality.
 
I think you missed Scott's sentiments. He will not be getting a 3D TV because he will not be able to calibrate and that's something he wants. At no point was he suggesting that the masses will boycott 3D because they can't get proper colour calibration and a 4% green shift due to the LCD specs drives them nuts! ;)

Yeah I know he wrote it as a personal preference. Calibration concern is limited to a smaller group of consumers nonetheless.

I am not sure if this is a purely recording issue either. e.g., The 3D Blu-ray developer may tune the colors while authoring the content, the installers also look at the lighting condition in your living room to calibrate your 2D or 3DTV.

That's actually a good point I hadn't cnosidered. Calibration for 3D viewing will be different to 2D viewing, and while switching between content colours will get messed, unless the TV has separate settings for 2D and 3D. Calibrating systems would need to have a colour transmission test for the glasses and offset the display colours accordingly. I'm not that fussed about proper calibration myself, changing things until I think they look right, though I do hate when people have the wrong display mode and colours or aspect are completely screwy, and yet they're happy with it!

Layman will probably use one of the preset modes.
 
Been experimenting with this for a few months. HDMI1.4a has enough bandwidth for 1080p120 so 1080p60 per eye is easy. Any of the 3D tvs can do it.

Bluray, Dolby and Sky all have standard formats for 3D and they're in active use today. Format decoding isn't really a tv problem - it's the responsibility of the player. As long as the player can understand the media format and turn it into sequential frames the tv will be able to show it. This works going forwards - if you player can handle some 'future transmission format' then the TV can show it.

Fundamentally though it isn't really the case that some manufacturers grasped how to do 3D well and others haven't. The Panasonics look better because they are plasma displays. The fast phosphurs let the image get back to black far quicker than LCD which minimizes the leakage between the eyes. The Panasonics are in a different league to LCD because of it. It will be very difficult for LCD panels to catch up as it's a display technology limitation rather than poor implementation. LCDs will of course be much cheaper. :)

Yeah, lack of a 3D calibration standards a pity. Fortunately, the lack of a standard doesn't limit you to choosing what looks best to you now and changing to the standard when its settled (if you prefer it). The nice thing about the Pioneers from the current lineup is when calibrated the 2D picture quality is better than anything else you can buy. Narrowly losing out only to the now unavailable Kuro screens. Unlike the 720p/HD-Ready saga the worst case is you have the best 2D tv money can buy...
 
Just checked - it seems while the connection has enough bandwidth, the HDMI1.4a spec only requires support for 1080i60 or 720p60 sidebyside frames...

Higher framerates are optional so they do work if the devices happen to implement it. This is not required though. From the 1080p60 argument point of view I don't see any need for new hdmi spec as the current spec already supports it. It's up to device manufacturers to implement 1080p60 3d if they see the need for it(pc gaming might be the only use case for Long time).
 
Bluray, Dolby and Sky all have standard formats for 3D and they're in active use today. Format decoding isn't really a tv problem - it's the responsibility of the player. As long as the player can understand the media format and turn it into sequential frames the tv will be able to show it. This works going forwards - if you player can handle some 'future transmission format' then the TV can show it.


I think the original poster was trying to describe different problem. It might be that blu-ray 3d is authored with differently calibrated sets than broadcast 3d. And hence you couldn't really just calibrate tv once for all the content. I think this problem really isn't 3d specific, it can happen to any broadcast(and likely does already, especially so for sports which are "realtime" captured). What I expect is that blu-ray 2d, 3d and dvd are authored with similar calibration in mind and they would work nicely for hifi people. The broadcasts on the other hand, I would be willing to bet they are not "proper" even at this moment.
 
Yap, Blu-ray 3D has standardized 3D video playback over HDMI. The spec is also free for other I/O interfaces (e.g., Display Port ?) to adopt. Any 3DTV and 3D projectors can work with the spec.

3D glasses are incompatible because their left and right shutters have been reversed. You have to wear the Samsung one upside down to see a Panasonic 3D screen. I suspect they can upgrade the TV firmware to support each other's glasses. Need to wait for the manufacturers to confirm.

I've read somewhere that you can actually change the shutter sequence in the tv's menu, so the glasses are actually compatible.
 
Yup - unfortunately it seems games consoles are topping out before they can do 1080p60 to each eye. Until consoles go through a hardware refresh I suspect it'll stay in the niche realms of stereo PC gaming. Just a matter of future proofing really...

Broadcast calibration would certainly benefit from a standard but there's not a great deal that an end user can do about that. They'll either adopt one or they won't. I assumed the OP was more frustrated by there being no obvious method of calibrating your tv for 3D content. Changing the settings for 3D content changes it for 2D content as well. :( You end up having two scene modes calibrated differently and manually toggling between them depending on if you're wearing the glasses or not. Not very elegant really.
 
Why's 1080p so important?

Yeah, not going to be essential now, I would expect though that the next generation of consoles will try to target 1920x1080@60fps x 2. That's twice what Super Stardust is running now, right? So it should be possible for next-gen consoles, with still enough room to have a lot of effects. Personally, I'm interested to ponder whether or not 3D is going to have an effect on what kind of effects are desired. I can for instance imagine that a lot of current framebuffer effects may become less important - you're maybe better off trying to do everything in 3D proper? Physics effects are going to count much stronger in this case too.
 
Why's 1080p so important?

I'd say not so important if we can't get 720p perform consistently this gen. Next gen is likely to push in another direction rather than consistent 1080 output. Mobility, Vivid 3D and/or responsive + accurate natural interface may be more attractive.

I suspect the implication is symbolic only. e.g. GT5 claims to support 1080p 3D, which challenges the notion that 3D cannot be done to 720p material. It's going to be case by case as usual.

I've read somewhere that you can actually change the shutter sequence in the tv's menu, so the glasses are actually compatible.

Already done ? That would be one way to address it. Didn't know the vendors have gotten their act together. I was expecting a firmware upgrade to enable this.

I think the original poster was trying to describe different problem. It might be that blu-ray 3d is authored with differently calibrated sets than broadcast 3d. And hence you couldn't really just calibrate tv once for all the content. I think this problem really isn't 3d specific, it can happen to any broadcast(and likely does already, especially so for sports which are "realtime" captured). What I expect is that blu-ray 2d, 3d and dvd are authored with similar calibration in mind and they would work nicely for hifi people. The broadcasts on the other hand, I would be willing to bet they are not "proper" even at this moment.

That's my understanding too.
 
Question, why does 3D not work with 60hz monitors @ 30hz per eye ... is that not good enough? Imagine if someone came up with 3D @ 60hz....i think that would be more significant than 3D without glasses..from cost and adoption perspectives!
 
30 hz per eye is very flickery. 60hz per eye is as flickery as an NTSC CRT, which isn't noticeable to most people. I doubt many would buy into flickering 3D - I did the Sega Master System 25hz per eye flicker and it really did flicker, but I endured. ;)
 
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