Summary
With a consumer unfriendly product Panasonic has gained early momentum with Hollywood studios in an impending 3D display technology format war. Whether Panasonic's technology will win out eventually is still uncertain.
Analysis
To render 3D images on TV displays requires showing a different picture to each eye. There are many display technologies and video content encoding methods that can be employed. Each requires either active glasses (with electronics and batteries or a power cord), passive glasses, or no glasses:
* The Panasonic display requires active shutter glasses. Those are heavy and expensive. They also open the shutter for each eye for only a small fraction of the time, reducing the display brightness and making the image quality poor except in a dark room.
* LG has demonstrated a display using active retarder glasses. This significantly improves on brightness though not on weight and cost of glasses.
* JVC, Acer , and Hyundai have implemented Xpol displays that show interleaved display lines with alternating light polarization. This allows the use of light weight, low cost, non-electronic glasses and yields full brightness.
*Toshiba, 3M, and others have worked on lenticular arrays that require no glasses at all for viewers sitting in "sweet spots" around the display.
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HD-DVD technology enabled the use of the existing infrastructure of DVD disc pressing technology, which would have made HD video discs cheap enough to give away in cereal boxes. HD-DVD used similar laser wavelengths as DVDs, which would have made players simpler and less expensive. Blu-Ray won the format war not because its technology was better for consumers but because of momentum in adoption by Hollywood studios.
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A 3D video format "war" is impending with at least 4 radically different competing technologies. It will not be settled for 3-10 years. Panasonic has learned that Hollywood determines the victor. Whether Panasonic's early success now will win out in the end is still far from certain.
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Far more video games than movies have been adapted for 3D displays. Look for 3D gaming to also impact on the winning 3D display technology.
This author consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
