3D TV prices coming down as quality lifts: glasses are still the drawback

THREE-DIMENSIONAL televisions have been on the local market for more than a year and the technology has drifted down from the top end of telly town to the mid-range.

Meanwhile, 3D content has grown from a trickle to a steady stream, although quality varies widely from the immersives high of 3D benchmark Avatar to the very mediocre.

While the technology is getting cheaper and 3D title lists are growing, you are unlikely to spend more than a small percentage of day-to-day viewing time wearing 3D specs, as most TV content is served up perfectly well in 2D.

That said, 3D can create some serious ooh and aah moments in a movie with properly crafted 3D effects.

A major choice for 3D TV buyers revolves around the glasses.

While tiny screen devices like Nintendo's 3DS handheld games machine can create good 3D without relying on glasses, the autostereoscopic technology they use has yet to transfer to the big screen and won't for some time.

That means putting up with 3D specs, and there are two technologies to wrap your head around.

The first, used by most manufacturers, is active shutter, which means each lens in the glasses is a mini LCD screen that blanks and unblanks the picture to each eye in sync with a transmitter on the TV.

Hence active shutter, and hence the 3D view, as the brain is fooled into seeing in stereo.

The downside to active shutter is the price and fragility of the battery-powered specs, which typically run to between $100 and $200 a pop, and the flickering as the lenses do their blanking trick.

The upside is picture quality as both eyes score the full 1080 lines of full HD resolution.

The second method is called passive 3D and it's similar to that used in movie theatres, where a polarising filter blanks the image to one eye and vice versa as both images are served up onscreen at the same time.

Passive glasses are much cheaper and lighter than active shutter and there is no flickering. The negative is in picture quality because the vertical resolution is halved as the scan lines are split between the eyes.

Either way on the glasses, and if you are keen to transform the family loungeroom into a multi-dimensional picture stage, here's a trio of 3D tellies worth a look.

Sony Bravia HX925

THIS is Sony's top-of-the-line 3D TV for the moment, with a screen that measures 55in. A 65in screen will arrive later this year.

Sony's hero, Bravia TV, ticks most of the spec sheet boxes for a premium telly.

As well as a built-in active shutter 3D transmitter and two pairs of 3D glasses, it has internet TV capability, with bandwidth piped in via an ethernet port or built-in WiFi.

Scratch and reflection-resistant Corning Gorilla glass -- as used in upmarket smartphones and tablets -- adorns the screen.

It has a bunch of ports, including four HDMI and two USB connectors, and Sony throws in an accessory camera for conducting Skype video calls. The box uses Sony's latest X-Reality Pro video engine, which is claimed to clean up noisy, pixellated low-res sources such as internet video.

The Pro version of X-Reality uses a dual-core processor, as apposed to a single core on the cooking version.

The engine does dress up crappy source material to an extent, but anything low-res being played on a 1980 by 1080 pixel resolution 55in screen, or worse a 65in screen, is going to have a hard time papering over all that space no matter how good the techno wizardry.

On the other hand, high-res source material such as 2D and 3D Blu-ray movies look fantastic, with excellent blacks and colour definition -- as they should given the Sony's range-topping $4499 price tag.

Selecting the right picture mode from 13 options for the backlit LED screen can get a little bewildering and, while the remote covered all the functions available on the set, it felt low-rent compared with the quality feel of the rest of the unit.

The Sony uses an active shutter system for 3D.

The Sony 3D glasses are designed to sit over the top of a pair of prescription glasses and viewers who are short-sighted, like me, will find they need to wear two pairs of eyewear for a sharp look at the screen.

I found that having all that hardware hanging off my nose tended to get uncomfortable over time and for much of my 3D viewing I ended up tolerating a blurrier view of the action, rather than load up my schnozz.

Sony claims with the HX925 to have eradicated much of the flickering that is the bane of active-shutter glasses systems, although I found flicker still noticeable but not as intrusive as earlier efforts.

The 3D picture stage was immersive with the action money shots on flicks like Resident Evil Afterlife (a C-grade movie with uncharacteristically good 3D) pumping up the adrenaline factor.

PRICE: $4499

RATING: 8/10

Samsung Smart LED TV 55D8000

SAMSUNG'S top-of-the range 55in LED 3D TV offers clear and compelling three-dimensional viewing, with full (1080p) HD.

It's the clarity you expect from 3D that uses the more expensive powered glasses, with frame rate sacrificed rather than picture quality.

When watching Jean-Michel Cousteau's Sharks 3D on Blu-ray, the sharks and turtles seemed to swim halfway across our loungeroom and the smaller marine life danced in front of our noses.

The clarity is there, the depth of field is pronounced, but the rub is active 3D's apparent difficulty with fast action, such as swimming sequences in The Ultra Wave Tahiti 3D.

As for the heavier active 3D glasses, for me their weight is no problem.

More significant was the mild eyestrain my wife and I both felt after 90 minutes of Cousteau's 3D underwater adventure, but none of this stopped us watching to the end.

Two-dimensional to 3D conversion on the fly is becoming standard on new 3D TVs.

You can watch live TV in 3D but the depth of field isn't as pronounced as with genuine 3D.

But this conversion also works with stills, as we discovered, and that was a hit with us. We linked up a USB drive with family photos and enjoyed a lengthy 3D slideshow of old travel pics.

My beef is the remote, which is a little confusing, and the integrated keyboard, which is compact, but in practice somewhat tedious to use for entering URLs. And you'll be paying $80 for basic 3D glasses, or up to $150 for rechargeable ones.

CHRIS GRIFFITH

PRICE: $4699

RATING: 8/10

LG 47LW6500

LIKE the other two tellies featured here, the 47in LG uses backlit LED screen technology but from there it parts company with the Sony and Samsung competition.

The LG uses passive 3D glasses that are light and do not rely on batteries.

For those who, like me, need to wear prescription specs for TV viewing, passive glasses are a boon.

Instead of wearing glasses over glasses, as with active shutter, LG supplies a pair of very light polarising lenses that clip on to your specs.

In use, the passive 3D screen was completely free of flicker and I'd willingly trade the barely noticeable loss of vertical resolution in 3D mode for the extra comfort of the glasses, although watching 540 instead of 1080p vertical resolution could become more of a problem with screens larger than the one on the 47in review unit.

The LG's other neat feature was its motion sensing remote control, similar to that found on a Nintendo Wii games console.

Instead of the bewildering array of buttons on most TV remotes, there's just a handful on the LG remote and you mostly just point and shoot at onscreen menus rather than thumbing your way through endless lists with a conventional remote.

The sooner this technology goes universal in remote land the better.

PRICE: $2499

RATING: 8.5/10

CONCLUSION

The big, 55in screen Sony and Samsung tellies are excellent 2D systems and very proficient at 3D if the heavier, expensive and battery-dependent active shutter glasses suit.

The LG is a smaller 47in unit and, while cheaper, doesn't have the living room oomph or the ultimate picture quality of the larger sets.

But its wonderfully easy to use motion control remote and cheap, comfortable, hassle-free passive glasses won me over in this review.