Toshiba to launch 'world's first' glasses-free 3D TV

AFP ^ | October 4,2010 | AFP

[libstripper]

Japanese electronics giant Toshiba on Monday said it will launch the first liquid crystal display 3D television that does not require users to wear special glasses. Toshiba will offer 20-inch and 12-inch Regza GL1 Series sets in Japan from the end of December, the company said.

The 12-inch model is expected to sell for about 120,000 yen (1,400 dollars) and the 20-inch model will carry a price tag of 240,000 yen, Dow Jones Newswires reported.

[libstripper]

Oh, woe is me!! Just looks like I'm going to have to stick with my 73" 2D Mitusbishi HDTV until these new TVs gat at least that large and become affordable.

[reefdiver]

Football will be great

[Red Badger]

But I can’t see without my glasses!.....................

[Slump Tester]

2 reasons to hate Toshiba:

They sold our top secret, ultra quiet submarine propulsion and manufacturing technologies to the Russians. Ever even hear of it? (Americans have very short memories.)

Try finding drivers for a Toshiba notebook if you don't have a restore disk and have a new HD without their BS partition. Even the Toshiba support site makes you buy Driver Detective to get the drivers. Pure greed!

[Las Vegas Ron]

3-D TV Ping

[Tolsti2]

They also tried to screw over the entire HD market by splitting up HD DVD and Blu-ray, and still lost in the end. No more Toshiba stuff for me when I can help it.

[FreedomGuru]

Glad Helen Thomas is retired.

Ewwww, The View in 3d.

[tongue-tied]

Its probably one of those technologies that put you into convulsions when you watch it for too long. (Remember that stuff from years ago? Video game causes seizures or some crap.)

3D doesn’t really interest me. Maybe if I were a gamer it’d be great, but for TV and movies 2D is fine. As long as I have the superb sound.

[yobid]

We just bought a 55” Samsung and love it (retired a 36” 200 lbs Toshiba tube).

Thanks for your post. I’ll stear clear of Toshiba products. Sony as well.

[Myrddin]

If their 3D TV is as bad as the crappy HD-DVD, they will go down in flames. I had a Sony BluRay and Toshiba HD-DVD player in the living room. The HD-DVD rarely managed to play all the way through a movie before having a serious glitch. I would have to restart and forward to the "glitch" to finish watching. The Sony BluRay has never failed, but firmware updates have continued to improve operation and feature sets. I did all the firmware updates to the Toshiba device, but there were always bugs and instability.

[Myrddin]

Predisposition to seizures is a problem with the viewer, not the technology. Flicker in the 7 to 10 Hz rage is likely to trigger vertigo or seizures in sensitive persons. Some TV programs broadcast in Japan affected a fair number of persons. We're talking a large audience, so there was a good probability of that audience containing some sensitive viewers. If you can't control your audience, don't deploy material that can trigger seizures.

[OneWingedShark]

Actually, I was more in favor of HD-DVD disks than Blu-Ray.
HD-DVD had two incredibly good things going for it:
1) Existing manufacture/production of discs would NOT require a whole new set of production machinery like Blu-Ray, the existing DVD infrastructure could have been used.
2) The data layer on DVDs and HD-DVDs is deep in the disc, in Blu-Ray it is right near the surface... this makes Blu-ray discs much more susceptible to non-reparable scratch-damage.

[Tolsti2]

Both of those things were irrelevent very early on. The hard coating on Blu-ray is fine. I’ve never had one from netflix so much as skip.

Who cares about the manufacturing anyway? Eventually they conquored that behind the scenes and capacity is fine. The technical advantages of Blu-ray farrr outstrip those. 50gig is about to be the minimum needed for 3D movies. The higher capacity and bandwidth on Blu-ray made it more future-proof by far and it was pretty clear very early on that Toshiba had to drop out sooner or later. They really irritated me by doing all the stuff they did.

[OneWingedShark]

>3D doesn’t really interest me. Maybe if I were a gamer it’d be great, but for TV and movies 2D is fine. As long as I have the superb sound.

This is one reason that it’s sad that FireWire didn’t catch on here in the US; now it looks like we’ll be stuck with HDMI (ewww) or RCA-audio connectors or, perhaps, fiber-optics for digital audio.

[TSgt]

We too just bought a 55” LED Samsung and love it!

[Tucker39]

Imagine reaching out and attempting to tweak her big nose!
And then having to go wash your hands because you FEEL dirty!

[WKUHilltopper]

Great. Crap in 3D now...

[tongue-tied]

Thanks, I wasn’t sure if I remembered that or not. (And it was Japanese TV, not a video game.)

People say they have trouble viewing a DLP TV - I assume for the same reason - but I have never seen any artifacts. I have DLP, a plasma, and an LCD(?) Sony Bravia. The LCD is by far the best picture.

I’d throw that plasma in the trash if it didn’t cost me so much.

[CrappieLuck]

But the crap now has depth.

I know if I spent that much on a TV, I’d be in pretty deep (crap). LOL

[OneWingedShark]

>Both of those things were irrelevent very early on. The hard coating on Blu-ray is fine. I’ve never had one from netflix so much as skip.
>
>Who cares about the manufacturing anyway?

Manufacturers. That is the people actually producing the item, they certainly *should* care at the least.

>Eventually they conquored that behind the scenes and capacity is fine. The technical advantages of Blu-ray farrr outstrip those.

Here is where I would disagree with you VERY hard. The ‘technical advantages’ amount to Null because of the draconian Copy-protection scheme, which incidentally the firmware updates can invalidate... that is to say that a firmware update could invalidate ALL of your library should the copy-protection scheme they employ be broken. And this is actually LESS restrictive than the original proposal which would have required internet access for ALL blu-ray players and bound each disc to a unique player: meaning that you couldn’t take the disc to a friend’s house to watch, you couldn’t simply buy a new player, and you wouldn’t be able to buy second-hand at all.

While those restrictions were eventually dropped they could be reinstated, especially via some firmware ‘update’. I think it would be wise to keep an eye on anybody who proposes such a horrible scheme (it honestly presumes that you have NO rights AND that you are a criminal copyright violator).

>50gig is about to be the minimum needed for 3D movies.

I’m going to point out that compression technologies have made some VERY interesting advances in the last decade; citing a size-minimum seems to be premature to me... also there are some animation styles that are better stored in 2D. [Things like subtitles and credits could even be stored in semi-text files... and text compression is pretty damn good.]

>The higher capacity and bandwidth on Blu-ray made it more future-proof by far and it was pretty clear very early on that Toshiba had to drop out sooner or later. They really irritated me by doing all the stuff they did.

*shrug* - And the TV/HD industry really irritated me by insisting on HDMI and the aforementioned copy-protection scheme. I’m not a particular fan of EITHER Blu-Ray or HD-DVD because of their adherence to that craptacular copy-protection scheme; but I do know that Toshiba developed the blue-laser that BOTH Blu-ray and HD-DVD use [the blue laser has a higher frequency allowing higher packing of the data-points] and that* coupled with the manufacturing issues put me on the HD-DVD side.

*Shouldn’t people, and even companies, be allowed to profit from their own work?