Why will 3D movies not work with regular TV?
Posted: July 27th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Common Questions | Tags: Movies, regular, work | 2 Comments »Apparently, you will need to buy a 3D TV or Blu-ray player to watch movies such as Avatar or UP in 3D. Why won’t it work on a regular TV? If you’re just sending light rays at your eyes, why can’t you send the same light rays from the TV just like the ones reflected off a screen at the movies?
The refresh rate is too low.
Current TV’s don’t support the required 120hz (yes, even current “120hz” tvs) to produce a 3d image using the current technology.
(At least that’s their excuse for me to replace my $1500 tv i bought a year ago)
Well first for a 3d movie to work you have to have double images of everything, then one image can only go to the right eye and one to the left. They are choosing field or frame sequential 3d format which uses the shutter glasses. One lens will open while the other one closes and they do this back and forth while the image for that eye flashes on screen while its lens is open. Now tv screens refresh so many times per second. Older lcd and plasma refresh at 60 hz or 60 times per second. So cut that in half and the right eye refreshes 30 times and the left 30 times with those double images flashing with them. At such a low speed you will see a flicker effect and the video looks choppy. So to get that refresh rate up for each eye so it does not see the flicker effect they are going with 120 hz so each eye can get back up to 60 hz like before. With the old crt models you could just plug it into a field sequential system and it used the 100 hz of those giving each eye 50 hz which is still high enough that you didn’t see a flicker effect. Now it is possible that they may come out with a system that just plugs into your higher hz lcd tv like the older systems but who knows.
If you want polarized 3d like they have in theaters you run into another problem. That 3d format uses a clockwise polarized light wave for the right eye and a counter clockwise light wave for the left eye. Then the glasses have circular filters that only allow on light wave through. Your tv can’t put out 2 different light waves. So they put a sort of coating on the screen so the very top horizontal line puts out one light wave, then the second horizontal line puts out the second light wave. 3rd line back to the light wave of the first line and then back and forth like that all the way down the screen. Then each line can only show the image for that eye. This will cut your resolution in half because half the lines only go to one eye. Where as with field sequential each eye uses all the lines. At the consumer electronics show in las Vegas only one company had a polarized tv and that was JVC, all others used the field sequential.