so i've been thinking it'd be pretty cool to play with all the shit poppin out at you and being 3d, but i don't have like 4 grand to spend on a tv and stuff... just wondering how you all felt about it.

I just bought a top of the line 55 inch samsung led 3d tv.  It's definitely not hype.  My tv looks great, and they seem to have eliminated the ghosting problem.  I love the 3d effect, although I would say it is not as deep as a panasonic, and doesn't pop out of the screen like some other tvs, but because it is somewhere in the middle perhaps it is a bit easier on the eyes.

There are not a lot of great movies in 3d, but I have comcast and all the premium channels so there is free movies and stuff there or you can rent some.  In general though, not an extensive list of titles just yet, which is too bad.  What I have seen looks great though.

I have an xbox 360, and the samsung has a 2d to 3d simulated effect, which definitely adds some depth to games.  I played around with Red Dead Redemption and GTA4 and the effect was cool, but less than what you would have with media actually created for 3d.

In general I'm pretty happy with my purchase.  Originally I wanted a top of the line 3d panasonic but their new model was a month out and the wifey game me a deadline.  It worked out though because the room has a lot of windows and I think the LED tv would be a little brighter in those circumstances.

The 2d picture is amazing by the way, just had it professionally calibrated. 

I would wait. 3D tvs that don't require glasses are being developed. And not too much really uses the technology anyways.

It is not hype. Some TVs are better than others, and really, it is very individual which TV feels better to your eyes, but it is just fantastic to play games and watch things in 3D. It isn't cheap, not by a long shot, but if you can afford to spare the extra money, it is definitely worth it.

When Hi Definition TV came out a lot of people 'didn't believe it.'  This is because there weren't actually that many Hi Definition programs at the time.  There was actually this annoying option for non-hidef programs to choose a color to substitute in for the blank spots on low def.  This gave a lot of programs this odd green or blue glow making the viewing actually WORSE than on a traditional TV.

As time went on every single station suddenly became hi definition and in my home country Canada the government issued a warning that they would be switching all of their programming over to HiDef and Canadians would have a limited time to get a new TV.

I suspect that 3D will be a lot like that.  Eventually it'll be slow to catch on but eventually everything will be 3d.

Dont really want the whole familly looking like Geordi La Forge...Otherwise i think 3d tv is great idea.

3D tv's are amazing. I love having seizures and being stricken with a sudden case of epilepsy. Its like watching asian television shows. All flashy and glowly but complete shit.

Stereoscopic 3D has been a dumb gimmick since the 1950s.  Now, dumb gimmicks can be cool for a little while.  But you don't want to spend thousands of dollars on something that is only going to be cool for a little while.

If you design an entire movie or television show around the premise that it's gong to be stereoscopic 3D, then you can make it work reasonably well.  But there are some things that have to be done differently, such as eschewing 2D overlay stuff entirely.  If you're watching a sports event in stereoscopic 3D, for example, then no matter where you display the score, it's going to look dumb.  In 2D, you can just put the score on a bar on the top or bottom of the screen and it looks just fine.

There's also the question of whether you want to have to grab dumb glasses every time you want to watch television.  Even if you're willing to do so today, would you be willing to do so every single day for the next week?  The next month?  The next year?  The next decade?

Autostereoscopic 3D (that is, without glasses) isn't coming in the foreseeable future, apart from in a very limited form.  It can work well if you know exactly where the person watching the picture is going to put his head.  For an intrinsically single-person device like Nintendo's Virtual Boy or 3DS, that can work.  But having the picture completely break if you move your head to the side a few inches is impractical for general television viewing.

For gaming, the picture is much bleaker yet.  A movie can be designed around not having any 2D overlay stuff.  But a lot of types of games intrinsically need a HUD to show life bars, skill bars, items, and so forth.

Worse, trying to render things for games means that you have to render frames separately for each eye, and thus twice as many frames per second.  Stereoscopic 3D thus effectively cuts your frame rate in half.  Furthermore, even after cutting it in half, you still need a much steadier frame rate than normal for the game to look right.  If you're playing a typical game in which you get an average 50 frames per second, but a few frames per second each take 50 ms to render, that looks fine.  In stereoscopic 3D, it would look terrible.  Needing to maintain a steady 120 frames per second means you need some seriously powerful hardware, and for some games, it just isn't possible to get a fast enough processor.

Movies and television programs don't have this problem, as they're not trying to render frames in real time.  Rather, it's all recorded ahead of time, when they have plenty of time to get every frame how they want it without any hitching.

I'd regard it as very unlikely that stereoscopic 3D will become ubiquitous for gaming in my lifetime.  It will probably become more common, but remain a relatively small market segment.  For television, it might catch on or it might not.  My best guess is that twenty years from now, there will be a lot of television shows in 3D and a lot in 2D--and there will be a lot of people who prefer 2D for at least some types of programs, even apart from the price tag.

This isn't at all similar to high definition.  There aren't any intrinsic drawbacks to going with higher resolutions or higher frame rates.  If we could do 16000x9000 resolution at 120 frames per second, everyone would agree that it looked better than 1920x1080 at 30 frames per second, or at least that it certainly didn't look worse.  The reason we don't is that it's too expensive, or at least, right now it's too expensive.

It may as well be Hype because the idea has been around for years with stereo 3d and the glasses. Keep in mind 3D TVs do not mean a better quality TV, I seen this from people before saying wow it's 3D the picture must be awesome, you have to have the 3D content to make it work for 3D. As this has been out for while now and hasn't really taken off so good I suspect it to be just another gimmick. You have far to many people who are not interested in wearing glasses to watch things in 3D and many people can't stand the effects it gives them. Most people will have vision dispositions after a couple hours of watching a 3D movie where their sense of vision is off. It definitely isn't going to be a mainstream thing till the 3D effect can be done better without the need for glasses. And as little content as their is it doesn't make it a hot item to get.

Maybe 3D porn will be the only thing good for it haha.

Personally, I don't care if it catches on or not. Watching stereoscopic 3D stuff gives me a huge headache. I can't even stand it in the Imax.

I saw a demo of the nVidia 3D setup a year or two ago, and it worked resonably well. They had WoW running on a 24" 3D LCD, and it looked ok. Stuff doesn't really pop out, it's more like you are looking in through a window. And while the graphics looked ok (it was WoW... not terribly impressive in the first place), the color was a bit washed out, and the interface (hotbars/minimap/etc) was a bit of a mess. The other demo was a FPS (I can't remember which), it looked a bit better (FPSes don't have much in the way of interfaces), but the added depth definitely made it "different" to play, I don't know if it's something you just get used to or not, but it definitely affected the way I tried to play the shooter.

It worked, it rendered fine. You had to wear those crazy glasses. I wasn't that impressed. My brother felt differently, and went out and got a 55" plasma 3D and hung it on his wall, and plays his computer through that.

When they come out with holographic displays, then I'll probably pay attention. Until then, it feels more like a gimmick to me (in addition to giving me a headache), but some people think it's fun, worthwhile, and adds immersion and entertainment value. To each their own.

I definitely recommend going and demoing out whatever you are thinking of getting before you get it. Different setups (TV makes, glasses setups, etc) will have different levels of effectiveness. I don't recommend buying any screen (TV or monitor) sight unseen, and that is especially true for 3D stuff.

do your eyes get tired from watching 3d for too long though? i feel like it'd be really intense all the time right? like i won't be able to just chill and relax?

Originally posted by zeonplayer22

do your eyes get tired from watching 3d for too long though? i feel like it'd be really intense all the time right? like i won't be able to just chill and relax?

I heard it's like sitting in a dark room for a few hours then going out in the bright sunlight, that kind of annoying can't open eyes much hurts to look around.

thanks for the advice people, i think i might wait it out then. since i'm not getting the 3d tv i do need a new monitor cause my old one is like breaking up and crap, which one should i get? something i can also play shooting games on?

Originally posted by zeonplayer22

thanks for the advice people, i think i might wait it out then. since i'm not getting the 3d tv i do need a new monitor cause my old one is like breaking up and crap, which one should i get? something i can also play shooting games on?

Price range, and what graphics card do you have and do you tend to play them at max graphics settings?

I have zero interest in 3D anything. I think there will be serious health problems surface from prolonged exposure.

I cant believe Im saying this but if you want 3d...Smoke some weed and watch tv.  If youve had enough, youll see it as 3d and in TONS of different neat effects! o.o

Edit:

This only applies to people who are in countries where the consumption of marijuana is legal.

Originally posted by bigsmiff

I have zero interest in 3D anything. I think there will be serious health problems surface from prolonged exposure.

 This^^^

I get bad headaches,a bit dizzy and my eyes start to throb (15 min in first and last movie i saw in 3d) i'm also one of those people tho that can't play first person games.

ever see "the Jerk"? yeah it will be just like that...

could be cool, but so is hype.

It isnt quite as good as 3-d in the theater because they do not pay as much attention to the 3d for the tv and because you have far fewer pixels to work with etc.

BUT it does work.  Avatar looks better in 3d than in 2d even if some of the background stuff is kind of blurred/a bit out of focus.

Comcast does have quite a few 3d things available...  The most notable one at this moment being How to train your Dragon.  That one is definitely better in 3d.  Then there are the sporting events. 

One thing you want to do though is to not chince on the glasses.  They have the starter glasses with the 2 sets and a movie or some such.  Get the ones at least one step higher than that where you have to buy them ala-carte.  It is worth it.

As for how expensive the TV needs to be -- we got ours a year ago for $1250.  It is the really high end samsung LCD 46" TV (the 240hz one) -- the last of them before they went LED which means it doesnt suffer from the new tech syndrome.  It is very good for everything and doesnt suffer from the sound problems the first run of the LED sets had.  Plus it was cheaper.