Panasonic are using 3D creation from Real D who you may recognise from any trips you have had recently to a 3D film at the cinema. There are a few systems used by cinemas but the most popular comes from Real D. They use circular polarised light from a projector and the 'sunglasses' to filter the images for the left and right eye.
| At home however the screen does not have the ability to polarise light so a different approach has been taken. The VT20B series instead uses Frame Sequential Technology. Basically two sets of 1080p images are used, one for each eye. By showing these images at 60Hz each, 120Hz overall they appear to our eyes as appearing on screen at the same time as just a blurred picture but are actually only on screen one at a time. Now we have the images on the screen we need to turn to the system to separate them for our eyes. |
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| The TY-EW3D10 glasses are not ordinary 3D specs like you have seen at the cinema. As we are not using polarised light they cannot be that simple but still need to separate the twin images coming from the screen. Each lens is actually an LCD shutter controlled by an IR signal coming from the screen. This keeps the glasses timed to the display and opens and closes the shutters in time with their relevant image on screen. As the left eye image is shown so the right shutter closes and so on. As each eye only then sees one image there is no blurring and when recombined in the brain, you have a rock solid, 1080p 3D picture. |
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| To get these images onto the screen there will be a couple of options to start with. Owners of SkyHD boxes can subscribe to the 3D material they will be offering as it is compatible with this system of you can choose Blu-ray thanks to its massive storage ability. On the disc both copies of the images will be stored (one for each eye) and then HDMI will carry these to your screen as normal. The player is fully compatible with non 3D discs too and the screen is capable of normal viewing too. This player has all the standard feature expected from a BD player at the top end of the market plus SD card reader, USB and WiFi connectivity for BD ive and to act as a DLNA client. |
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A few technical challenges were presented to the engineers during development of the systems but each has been overcome and the results are beneficial to normal viewing as well as to 3D. To stop after-images from one image interfering with the next image due to the cycle time of the plasma phosphors, the developed new quick cycling phosphors. Luminescence time of the cells has been lowered but the intensity increased, all designed to prevent mixing of the individual images for each eye and prevent blurring. This also means that 2D images are presented with stunning clarity and rich bold colours. So not only do we get superb 3D but normal viewing is improved too.
The Blu-ray player houses the award winning PHL (Panasonic Hollywood Laboratories) Chroma Processor which faithfully recreates impeccable images and colours from the data on the disc. A jitter-less sound system produces 7.1 audio with finesse to match the visuals and DLNA now allows you to stream from your home network via inbuilt WiFi or Ethernet connection. The player also boasts HDMI 1.4 which is required for the 3D image transfer system.
Full product details will appear on the product pages as they become available.
