EricBall's Tech Projects

I find that panning the camera in an arc rather than simply left/right creates a nice illusion of 3D without anything special, no glasses, no 3D tv, no special discs or any crap.

 

I think 3D is a mistake the industry wants to forget. And they removed it because it still costs money.

 

I also think they'd rather put the extra processing power toward smoother frame rates and color processing and higher resolutions. That sort of thing.

 

And then we have the infantile "internet" asking when will it become popular again? It never was popular to begin with..

3D was a desperate gimmick the manufacturers adopted in an attempt to sell more TVs. That's all. It never really worked very well, because 3D really needs to fill your field of vision, otherwise something breaks the plane of the edge of the screen, and the effect is immediately ruined.

 

Once HDTVs became commonplace and most homes already had them - there was no reason for people replace them. The improvement in quality over old TVs was already there, so apart from larger screens, there was no incentive for consumers to buy new ones. There wasn't enough 3D content to make people feel the need to buy into 3D. Plus, it's a chore to watch 3D, so nobody really cared.

 

My HDTV is almost 10 years old, but it's a perfectly good 46" 1080p Sony HDTV. I have no interest in replacing it. I don't need to. It's incredibly reliable, and the picture is still excellent.

 

The latest gimmick is 4K. It's effectively useless at the moment, unless you have a massively large TV and actual 4K content. Unlike 3D though, content creators are actually supporting 4K. But it's not going to entice people to replace their existing HDTVs anymore than 3D did. They'll replace them only when their old ones fail, or they want to add another TV, or get a bigger screen. HDR will have a more significant impact on picture quality, but your average TV buyer doesn't really care about that either.

I'm not suprprised they'd drop it, they've long cut corners wherever they could. My 2001 Mitsubishi only supports 480i, 480p and 1080i. It shows a bluescreen if you send it 720p. Apparently it was "too expensive" for them to add one addition format to a $5K TV even though we'd had multi-sync monitors that supported just about whatever you threw at them for years. In 2000 I even had my OS/2 system driving my 19" Sony 400PS at 2048x1536.

 

While I like 3D movies at the theater, provided they're filmed well (ie: don't give me a headache by shoving images out into my face), I haven't had the desire to watch them at home.

 

I've been quite impressed watching Amazon Prime 4K content on my monitor and have been thinking about getting a 75" 4K set. One thing holding me back is I believe HDR is more important than the 4K, I'm not your average TV buyer , but there's 2 competing HDR standards: Dolby Vision using 12 bits per color, and HDR10 using 10. I'm waiting for that to settle out.

I agree with both of you on all points.

 

IMHO 4K is only good when you sit really close to a really big TV - and when the signal isn't severely compressed. (Although 4K+ does make more sense on the production side.) And not only would I have to replace my perfectly good HDTV for 4K, but I'd need to replace my home theater amplifier (plus a source of 4K content).

 

HDR is a nice bullet point on the box, but I doubt it will make many inroads beyond the console crowd.

So, 3D blu-ray players are dead too.

The future is 3D goggles then it will morph into a direct neural network.

First I heard of them..

To me, HDR is just enhanced colors. Bordering on artificial and more vibrant than what the eye sees. I think the feature is a NOT a selling point, and it will be absorbed into the option menu.

 

..Only to be removed at a later date as a form of cost cutting.

It appears manufacturers are still making 3-D Blu-Ray players, although who knows for how much longer.

 

Although it does make me wonder whether the lack of new 3D TVs will have a "trickle back" impact on the sales of 3D Blu-Ray discs, and from there on 3D films.

 

 

The HDR standards increase both the dynamic range and the color gamut which, in theory, will make the resulting video more realistic (ignoring the differences between RGB and full spectrum).