Is 3DTV Going To Be Any Good?

I remember our huge 40 inch CRT TV we had in the front room, I thought that was as good as TVs could be, even though the back stuck out a few feet! Then plasma TVs started to emerge and suddenly you could hang your TV on the wall, which compared to the old CRT units was like magic. LCD televisions were the next onto the market, and they started to draw people away from plasma TVs that suffered with screen burn, then HDTV sprang up, so what is next on the horizon?

A recent development has been the use of LEDs for the backlighting of an LCD TV, previously they used CCFLs (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) which are bulky compared to LEDs. There are two versions of this technology, one where the LEDs go all the way across the back of the screen, which is the best way, or one where the LEDs are at the side and the light is directed to where it is needed, either way you get a TV much slimmer than the CCFL versions.

3D televisions are starting to come onto the market now, but the reaction to them has not been that great because the technology is so new. Don’t get me wrong, 3DTV is going to be amazing in the future, but at the moment you have to wear special glasses which ruin the experience. Currently the TVs use ‘active shutter’ technology which means the glasses need to have shutters in them that open and close many times a second, that gives the experience a strange flickering effect, plus reports suggest that the 3D effect on the TVs won’t work if you sit more than a few feet away from the unit.

Remember these are the first generation of 3DTVs though, so the people who like to have the newest toys will buy these models, then the rest of us will wait for them to improve the technology and buy the later versions of them. There are one or two companies working on commercial applications of 3D viewing without having to wear glasses, so hopefully that will filter down into our TVs soon.

OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) are another technology which we can look forward to, although it has been in the pipeline for years and they can’t seem to get above a 13 inch screen at the moment. They are still working on it though to make larger screens which we can have in our homes, but if they do crack the current problems then the resulting TV will be just millimeters thick! So the future of TV is certainly interesting, I can’t wait to see what things will be like in 5 years time…

If you want a huge LED LCD TV then at the moment something like the Samsung UN55B8000 is popular.