Wednesday, January 7, 2009

3d a smash at CES? LaserVue puts plasma to shame...?

Or so they say here. Supposedly, 3d ready HDTVs like Mitsubishi's DLPs and Panasonic's Plasmas are the rage right now at CES. What is a 3d ready HDTV? It basically an HDTV which can take any Blu-Ray {and perhaps any HDMI digital input} and transform the standard flat 2d picture into a stereoscopic picture. This means you can sit in front of the DiamondScan or the Viera and watch Dark City, or Apocalypto or No Country for Old Men in 3d. All you need are the customary glasses. The original authors and engineers of the film and disk do not need to do anything special to permit this stereoscopic feature to function. Its all done, post-process, with our marvelous silicone digital signal processing technology.

Although I have never been a particular fan of 3d movies, I must admit, this is cool feature. It would be fun and cool to try it out with my library. It would give me a reason to go back and watch all my favorites again. I am skeptical it will work well {this technology has never worked well in my estimation} but it would be fun to try it. Based on the enthusiasm for the tech, it must be working better than I would presume.

But then again...

We come to the issue of LaserVue. If you read my past blog entries, you know what I think about LaserVue: Its a fraud. The emperor has no cloths on. I say this is as a commited DLP fan who wishes it would work. I am more likely to buy a Mitsubishi DiamondScan 835 than a LaserVue right now, and not because of LaserVue's price. I would finance it, if I though it would work better. It does not.

Nevertheless, somehow, someway, the lovely Alix Steel [will you marry me babby?] is all bubbly about how LaserVue puts Plasma to shame. She even embedded a small res video in her post to prove it... not that such a proof can prove her point. I hope you are right, Alix, but I am highly skeptical. One thing I will say is this: You are girl after my own heart. Image quality is more important than skinny screens.

I vow that I will give LaserVue another look soon. It may be that Mitsubishi debugged their shtick in the past few months. I was expecting major improvement with the next gen. So far we have no generational landmark, but Mitsubishi may be making improvements to the LaserVue firmware. This process did wonders for my mighty PS3.

In my last survey of the market, Panasonic's marvelous Viera PZ850 series proved itself to be a serious contender for the championship. If the LaserVue can put such a screen 'to shame' it will be worth every penny of the $7,000 they are asking for it. It is no mean task to crush the PZ850 series or the Pioneer Kuro Elite Pro.