We've tried Panasonic's 3D glasses

Panasonic has taken us by surprise: the glasses that come with its new 3D TV are actually nice to look at!  Well, at least they're better than the ones you get at the cinema.  We tried them out in front of the manufacturer's new 50'' VT20.

We'll come back to the TV itself soon.  What we're interested in here, though, is the glasses, which now have a name: TY-EW3D10.  They're light, but seem solid at first sight and feel robust, and nothing like the horrors we get at the cinema that leave you with a sore nose.  Here's what they look like:

But what do you ooh like when you're wearing them?  That's the question …

They're not unlike a ski mask.  Here I am from the front:

 

They're switched on in this photo, which is why you can only see one eye: lenses that darken and open alternately 120 times a second are at the heart of active 3D technology.  There is one small change here though: to improve the impression of 3D and to avoid the fatigue caused by skipping from eye to the next, sometimes both eyes are blacked out, as you can see here:

That's another theme we'll come back to, as it's essential for understanding 3D.  Panasonic calls this problem of jumping from one eye to the other 'crosstalk', but that's something of a cover term for a multitude of sins: it includes ghosting (the same motion blur we've been talking about for years), encoding problems and incorrect synchronisation between the glasses and the TV.  The upshot of all of this is that people with with sharp eyes can occasionally detect phantom images on each side.  Reducing this effect by any means necessary is the next big challenge for 3D TV!

And if you have real glasses?

A friend of ours from French blog Lense.fr also offered to model the glasses, and you can see that Panasonic's glasses sit easily on top of regular glasses.  The nose support, which you can adjust to fit properly, isn't quite perfect here:

 

 

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