by Brent Butterworth

December saw what may be the two most significant events in the history of 3-D video. On December 17, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced the finalization of the Blu-ray 3-D standard. The following day marked the release of Avatar, which will be as important to 3-D as the Magna Carta was to the rule of law and Gilligan’s Island was to the modern sitcom.

Based on what I’ve heard, read, and watched, the 3-D we see in the home might just beat out what we see in the theater.

The standard released by the Blu-ray Disc Association requires the use of a new 3-D Blu-ray player (or a Sony Playstation 3) and a 3-D TV. It will pass on the new HDMI version 1.4 interface, so no special cabling will be required. Standard 2-D Blu-rays and DVDs will play on a 3-D player, and 3-D Blu-rays can be backward-compatible with existing 2-D Blu-ray players. Discs can carry 3-D video in full 1080p resolution.

While few specifics of the new standard have been made available to the public, manufacturers tell me that the new 3-D TVs will require that viewers wear LCD “shutter glasses. When the TV is showing the left-eye image, the left LCD shutter becomes transparent and the right shutter becomes opaque. The opposite happens for the right-eye image.

These shutter glasses may be a little clunky, and they probably won’t look terribly cool, and they’ll probably cost $100 or so to replace if you accidentally sit on them. However, they may have an advantage over the polarized glasses you need to watch Avatar, Up, and other 3-D releases in the movie theater.

When watching Avatar, I noticed that if I turned my head slightly, the sides of the image went out of alignment, as if I were looking at it with my eyes out of focus. I had to be careful to stare almost straight at the screen if I wanted the whole image in focus. LCD shutter glasses shouldn’t suffer this problem. While LCDs don’t perform the same at all angles, they shouldn’t produce the blurred images that I saw during Avatar.

The CES show in January promises lots and lots of new 3-D TVs and Blu-ray players—and lots of really impressive demos—so we’ll soon have a better idea of what the new home 3-D video technology offers us. Actual products should be available sometime around summer of 2010 … just in time for the Blu-ray release of Avatar.

by: John Sciacca

Backing up your data is something that everyone plans on doing, but tends to get backburnered for one reason or other. Truthfully, I was no different. Even with minor scares like my power supply crapping out and the hard drive making random clicking sounds — you know, the computer basically shooting up red flares telling me that trouble was a brewin’ – I still managed to put it off.

My procrastinating came to a head one day when my computer totally locked-up. After installing some updates and running a virus scan, not even the failsafe control-alt-delete worked. After a hard power down, the computer booted up into DOS and the monitor immediately began filling with screen after screen of code. This went on for several minutes until finally the desktop came on…totally blank!

I was instantly overcome with that watery, narrowly-avoided-a-horrible-car-wreck feeling. Had I stumbled across a virus that wiped my drive clean just for giggles? Was this the Conflicker worm rearing its ugly head? But most importantly, had I just lost my precious, irretrievable data? Every digital photo and video we’ve taken of our 2 ½ year old. My 8,000 song music collection. Eight years of Sound & Vision articles. Fifteen years of financial records. And every other scrap of data that makes up the unique 0s and 1s of what I hold dear.

Fortunately, the desktop returned to normal and my data was intact, but in those few moments, I became a true believer and I immediately ordered a hard drive, the Western Digital My Book Mirror. Out of the box, this wonder is pre-configured for RAID 1, meaning that it uses the 2 Terabytes as two mirrored 1 Terabyte drives. With some free software found on the Net, the computer now automatically performs back-ups weekly. Beyond the fear of losing data from a drive crash, I now have a small data “vault” that is easily evacuated in the case of emergency. (I live in hurricane prone Myrtle Beach.)

Spend a few seconds and consider what you’d lose if your computer suddenly had a grand mal. Sobering, no? Whether you buy a large external drive, use Network Attached Storage (NAS) or a bunch of USB drives, pay for remote storage or just routinely burn everything onto a DVD (or Blu-ray), make sure you’ve got a back-up plan in place and stick to it!