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

Surely everyone remembers the latest format war. I happened to be at the Toshiba press conference in January 2008; the day that Toshiba’s Jodi Sally tearfully/agonizingly acknowledged that Warner would be switching allegiance to Blu-ray, effectively throwing the final tractor trailer load of dirt onto HD-DVD’s coffin, cementing Blu-ray as the “winner.”

But have they really won? Are people buying Blu-rays?

If you read the circulated numbers, you’ll see things like sales of Blu-ray titles being up 91% for the first six months of the year. “Wow! 91%! That’s huge!” Or is it?

Percentages don’t tell the whole story. I could tell you that I had a 2500% increase in funds. I could also tell you that I found a quarter. For Blu-ray, that 91% equals $407 million dollars. Compare that to the $14.5 billion that DVD pulled in last year.

From what I see, no one is buying Blu-rays. I recently vacationed in Destin, Florida and visited the Barnes & Nobles there. The girl running the video section said she’d never sold a Blu-ray disc. I go to my Super Wal-Mart about three times a week (the reality is every bit as depressing as it sounds) and I have never seen anyone even looking at the Blu-ray section, let alone buying any.

So, what’s the problem? It’s not the quality; Blu-ray looks and sounds amazing. (Please – PLEASE! – don’t try and tell me about your upconverting DVD player. It doesn’t look as good. It…doesn’t…look…as…good.) I have been a Netflix subscriber since they started, and now I shudder when I get a disc that isn’t Blu-ray. (Even though Netflix now charges a premium for the privilege. Why I oughta….) The audio/video performance is definitely not the problem.

While it took Blu-ray a while to get their players all sorted out (profile 1.0, 1.1, 2.0… WTF!?), the players are now (mostly) up to finalized spec. And the pricing is down where it needs to be with players at the sub $200 level. So it isn’t the players.

The problem is the software. The price for movies is just WAY too high. Most Blu-ray titles are marked at $34.99 and higher. And when the Blu-ray is sitting next to the double-disc-ultimate-extended-director’s cut DVD selling for $14.99, it makes it hard to get excited about plopping down the extra $20.

So, here’s a crazy idea… This is a new format. Why not, I dunno, incentivize me to support it? Instead of $20 more, why not $1 less. By God, I might actually buy two! Especially for films that are being re-released that I probably already bought. Yeah, I’m looking at you Terminator 2 and the four versions (VHS, Laser Disc and two DVDs) I already have. (And don’t get me started on George Lucas and all my versions of Star Wars…)

What do you think? Have you gone Blu? And if so, what is the magic price point that has you opening up your wallet to add discs to your collection?