Well, the Times article said that the number of 3D movies made is down from last year. Yes, they are making money since all blockbusters are 3D now and the theaters charge more for them. But it is possible that the audience will get bored.
It came bundled with the new HDTV a few month ago. A few attempts to use it found it to be just as headache-inducing as 3D movies, so I don’t bother trying any more.
Man, especially in a sports bar kind of situation it seems like it wouldn’t work! However, if things do go to 4K, I could see that being good for sports bars - especially ones for the really big projection screens or monitors (less so for smaller ones).
I have never been a fan of 3D. Just the fact that I have to wear the 3D glasses over my prescription glasses is a dealbreaker right off the bat.
We were talking about first installing it in the “party room”, which holds around 30 people. The problem is that inevitably, there will be sync issues between the 3D and 2D versions of the game. That was a major issue during the early days of HD when few HD receivers had SD outputs that could work at the same time. Also, the party room is usually rented out to groups who put a deposit down to hold the room, which would also apply to the 3D glasses for the group.
The biggest projection screen I have installed for a sports bar client is 150" diagonally. My goal is always to make sure the image on the screen has the same apparent brightness as the LCD and plasma screens in the rest of the bar. Big without bright is worse than useless. And I tend to set them up for 720P because that is what ESPN broadcasts. If DirecTV ever gets enough bandwidth to start sending ESPN out at 1080P, I’ll switch. But I can’t imagine that they’ll move to 4K until there is a breakthrough in the cost of satellite launches and they can put up a bunch of new, much higher bandwidth birds.
Wait. How much bandwidth do the soon to be defunct 3D channels use and how would that compare to that needed for 4k with either H.264 or H.265 compression?
edit: there’s also VP9 which is being urged by Google and apparently is available now (as opposed to H.265)
The ESPN 3D channel is 1080i. They send out two 540i images, top and bottom and the TV stretches them out and displays them as the 2 3D images. You can even tune a regular HD receiver to the 3D channel - you see top & bottom near-identical images. So no more bandwidth than any other HD channel.
i usually stands for interlaced doesn’t it? Anyway, why does wikipedia list the format as 720p?
Yes, 1080i means interlaced. I’ve got FIOS, and they’re sending a 1080i signal with 2 images - that’s what the TV claims at least. I’ll check again tonight.
There are 2 images, but not top and bottom. Interlaced means alternating lines. The images are not stretched but I stand to be corrected. 
edit: Oh. The main question though is how they handle 3d with a progressive signal, if that is indeed correct. Apparently 720p is the 3DTV standard but I followed the link and nothing jumped out at me. So I’m going be lazy and wait for someone to feed me a knowledge mcnugget.
I’m fully aware of what interlaced means, thanks. What I meant is that when FIOS is showing a 3D program, either ESPN 3D or a 3D movie on demand, they transmit each single 1080i frame with 2 images - one on the top, one on the bottom, possibly with some extra encoding info. The TV then displays this by stretching each image, and displaying them sequentially as left eye & right eye.
This is apparently one of the standards for 3D transmission. My TV (Panasonic GT30) lets me select what types of 3D to attempt to detect - frame sequential, side by side or top & bottom.
I know that FIOS does the top/bottom images because if I tune a non-3D HDTV to the 3D channel, it displays it, but as the two top/bottom images.
OK sorry. I never cared anything about 3D and never bothered to learn about it. The whole stretching thing sounded odd though and honestly I still don’t understand. The bottom line though is what bandwidth is being used by the ESPN 3DTV channels. That appears to be an established standard.(got tired of waiting for my mcnugget)
So it appears that ESPN 3D is at least 50 frames per second, which would be double 720p 2D bandwidth assuming that 720p is at 25 or 30 frames per second. That’s where I’m stopping though. I refuse to do the math.
I keep hearing that it’s huge in the non-American markets and as Hollywood is moving more focus there, they’re seeing a benefit to 3D blockbuster movies.
But as Americans don’t care as much about 3D, 3D TV doesn’t make any sense.
It was a gimmick in the 1950s, it was a gimmick in the 1970s, and it’s a gimmick now. I predicted on this board in 1999 that it would last five years, tops. Seems like it’s right on schedule.
I didn’t make it clear, but my earlier comments were as much about 3DTV as 3D films. Having wobbly fakey depth in the picture doesn’t really bring all that much to the party. In the end, even with the technology perfected (for some values of perfect), it’s just a gimmick.
3D movies are making shitloads of money because they are often twice the price of 2D showings, shown on bigger screens and in bigger theaters, and offer advantages like reserved seating. Sometimes there are no 2D showings in prime hours, either. I’d be surprised if an exhaustive economic analysis showed 3D-qua-3D as being a big draw or moneymaker.
Heh.