3-D TV: The Next Big Thing?

Hollywood has noticed the runaway success of 3-D movies at the box office; the 3-D versions often account for as much as two-thirds of the ticket sales, even though the 2-D versions appear on far more screens. About 15 major feature films will be released in 3-D in 2009, with twice that number scheduled for 2010.

That means for the first time, we'll have Hollywood entertainment content ready to be piped into home theaters. A Consumer Electronics Association survey noted that 50 percent of consumers are willing to pay extra to get 3-D functionality on their TVs. So it should come as no surprise that HDTV manufacturers are scrambling to support 3-D TV.

As it turns out, plasma and 120Hz LCD technology are both adaptable to 3-D TV using active glasses, which are different from the passive glasses used in most 3-D movie theaters. Active glasses use LCD material to block the light to one eye, then the other, at very fast rates. By synchronizing them to the content on the HDTV, full-resolution 1080p images can be presented sequentially to the left and right eyes, and still have a total frame rate of 60Hz. (In general, speeds of 60Hz or faster are required to prevent annoying flicker in the images.) Panasonic has announced a version of this plan for plasma TVs.

Other technologies can be used to show 3-D images with either passive glasses or no glasses at all, but these are too expensive to manufacture or have significant viewing limitations, and thus are less likely to be successful, at least for the next few years.

Panasonic and Sony have already made high-profile announcements about their respective plans for 3-D TV in the home, with both promising HDTVs and Blu-ray players. Sony already is involved, providing 3-D cameras and other equipment for movie production. Panasonic, too, has 3-D cameras in production -- including on James Cameron's highly anticipated "Avatar"; plus, the company aims to educate consumers and dealers about 3-D TV by doing a nationwide demonstration road show

One roadblock for 3-D content has been the lack of an industry standard, but that's fast changing. Hollywood already adds depth information to many of its films, and translates this into different formats used by different cinema projection systems such as the RealD system based on polarized light, or the Dolby system that uses sophisticated RGB color filters to create stereoscopic images. Creating a similar "home 3-D master" is not that difficult -- the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers is well on the way to defining such a specification, which can then be used to provide data for a variety of display formats. And the Blu-ray Disc Association is working on a standard for storing 3-D on prepackaged media. HDTVs can be made to work with a variety of 3-D data-stream formats, which means they should be able to handle whatever formats may evolve in the 3-D TV market.

Don't expect this to happen overnight. Samsung and Panasonic have been selling 3-D-capable rear projection HDTVs for years with little interest by consumers. The first 3-D-capable flat panel HDTVs will start appearing in 2010, but until there's a critical mass of 3-D content -- and broad distribution over cable, satellite and Internet as well as Blu-ray -- adoption is likely to be slow. Even with new technology that can "synthesize" depth information from existing 2-D movies and television programming, it will probably be 2012 or 2013 before 3-D TV will start to have an impact on sales in this country.

So if you're planning on buying a new HDTV this year, you don't need to worry about waiting for a 3-D TV choice. But, by this time next year, it could become the fifth item -- after high refresh rate, LED backlighting, network connectivity and energy economy -- on your list of the latest must-have features.