3DTV Positives and Negatives
Here's the thing about 3dtv. They are cool. but they also aren't. I got a new tv a few months ago that happened to be a 3D TV, but that wasn't the reason I bought it. When you are looking at TVs now, the best quality TVs for 2D watching just also include 3D functionality. This has caused a problem for many consumers who swear that they don't want any 3D tvs. A few months back I sold HDTVs to customers and the number of times I had to deal with objections about getting a TV that is labeled as 3D was countless! This is essentially the advice that I game to my customers:
Yes, this TV does have 3D support, and I realize that you may never even use the 3D capabilities of this TV, but if you compare this TV to one that does not have 3D support, when watching entertainment in 2D, the 3D tv is still better. TV manufactures still are making a wide variety of qualities of TV, and it just so happens that they reserve the 3D capabilities for their best TVs, regardless if you use the 3d or not.
So for customers I had to convince them that if they were looking to get the best 2D picture possible, they would be purchasing a TV that had 3D support. So that is just one problem with 3DTV.
Now, when I purchased my TV, I purchased it a) because it was a good deal, and b) because it was a fantastic quality TV. I have the 60" panasonic GT30 plasma. I did not really expect to use 3D for most of my entertainment watching, in fact, the TV doesn't even come with a pair of 3D glasses, those are sold separately! I just wanted the best (and biggest) TV that my money (or lack-there-of) could buy. For me, the panasonic was the best choice.
I want to take a second to just explain the two types of 3dtv, active and passive. Active 3DTVs alternate the picture back and forth usually about 120 times per second. So if time were paused, you would only see one image on the screen at any given time. That image would be for either the left eye or the right eye. The glasses with active TVs are powered so that they are in sync with the back and forth flickering of the TV image so that one of the two images will always be seen only by the left eye, and the other image will only be seen by the right eye (because the left eye is getting blocked due to the glasses). This allows you to see the image in full 1080p, resulting in a sharper image, but since the screen alternates back and forth, you tend to get a little bit of stuttering when things are moving faster on screen.
The second type of 3D is passive. This type uses polarized lines of pixels so that one of the lenses of the polarized (non-powered) glasses sees half of the pixels on screen, and the other lens would see the other half of the pixels. This means that the image is not switching back and forth, therefore there is typically no stuttering as is present in the active 3D, but since the lines of pixels alternate in visibility between left eye and right eye, that means that at any given time, each eye is only seeing half the pixels on screen. This means that rather than seeing a 1080p image (1,080 horizontal lines that make up the image) each eye only sees 540 lines. This essentially turns an HD image into something only slightly better than enhanced definition, (480 lines that make up the image).
Between the two of them, each has their pros and cons. Either one has a tradeoff. With active, you get full 1080p in each eye rather than only 540p per eye, but with passive, you get an image that is displayed on screen 120 times per second and sometimes more, whereas with active you alternate between eyes so you essentially only get 60 frames per eye per second, so you get stutter in fast moving scenes.
Now that you know the difference, I just want to say that there are other technologies that don't involve using glasses, much like the Nintendo 3DS. Its a technology that is being used on some TVs in europe as well which is called parallax barriers I believe. It essentially allows the viewing of 3D images without having to wear glasses. It is still a very new technology that doesn't have the same 3D depth or clarity that the other technologies have.
I personally don't care about having to wear glasses, many of them are really light and comfortable to wear, even for long periods of time. So I believe there are two options for how to make these two technologies better. For active 3D, you simply have to increase the flicker speed so that each eye is seeing 120 frames or more per second. For passive 3D, you have to increase the resolution of the TV set, so that even after each eye is only seeing half the pixels, they will each be seeing a 1080p image. Until I see what results these two changes actually produce in the quality of 3DTV viewing, I can't say which would be a better choice.
As for my personal 3D usage, although I said I wouldn't be using 3D much, I am finding that when there is a really cool movie like Transformers 3, I am choosing to watch the 3D version of it because it just gets me that much more immersed in the experience.