Zalman monitors have been discontinued

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Matthew
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Zalman monitors have been discontinued

Post by Matthew »

Zalman's monitors have now been discontinued, including their 3D monitors.

Does anyone know why they discontinued them? Did it have anything to do with the quality of them? I've owned a 22" Zalman Trimon 3D monitor since 2009, and the quality is decent, but not as good as other high end monitors.
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cybereality
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Re: Zalman monitors have been discontinued

Post by cybereality »

It seemed more like a neat experiment more than anything else. I had the 22" model, got it when it first came out. I got a lot of good use out of it. The product was fine. However, it was priced pretty expensive and probably couldn't compete with Nvidia 120Hz monitors that were cheaper and offered and arguably better experience.
Matthew
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Re: Zalman monitors have been discontinued

Post by Matthew »

I've noticed that it seems that all other passive 3D monitors have been discontinued as well. Has passive 3D lost the competition to active 3D? Is active 3D generally considered to be better?
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Likay
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Re: Zalman monitors have been discontinued

Post by Likay »

Computermonitors are mostly active it seems. Many 3D-tv's uses passive technology so i wouldn't say that passive is on the way out. All methods have their pros and cons which is why preference of a specific tech is highly individual.
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Matthew
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Re: Zalman monitors have been discontinued

Post by Matthew »

I've now purchased an Asus VG278HE monitor and nVidia 3D Vision 2 and am using it.

This isn't the first time I've seen active 3D; I have an eDimensional system. I also have seen 3D movies in an XpanD theater. This is the first time I've owned a shutter glasses system that's any good, however. Of course eDimensional's is trash. :)

I have mixed thoughts about it. Although the Lightboost technology results in CRT-like motion sharpness, it also results in CRT-like flicker. If the image is bright enough, the flickering can be seen when viewed through the glasses, even at 120 Hz -- because it's pulsed on top of the shuttering. To eliminate this, it would need an even higher refresh rate (240 Hz would be ideal, but is not supported by this monitor, or any other monitor I know of).

With LCD screens, the Lightboost technology is necessary to minimize ghosting, but it has some drawbacks.

It also has what I've long considered to be the main drawback of active stereo: There are artifacts when you move your eyes rapidly, because your eyes aren't in the same position when the left and right eye images are displayed.

On the plus site, the visual quality is spectacular. The brightness / contrast ratio isn't that good, but I suppose that's how all LCD displays are like. I really wish OLED displays would become standard.

Compared to my Zalman Trimon monitor, there are some major advantages, and major disadvantages. I think that passive 3D would be far better than active, if passive 3D displays had as high resolution. Since the resolution is halved, currently, the only way to get HD resolution with passive 3D is with 4K TVs, which cost thousands of dollars. Contrary to what people seem to think, it is possible for a passive 3D display to have full resolution in 3D mode. Just make every pixel row consist of two subpixel-rows, one for the left eye and one for the right eye. This means doing the interleaving at the sub-pixel level, rather than the pixel level, and having twice as many sub-pixels per pixel (three for the left eye, and three for the right eye). I wonder why they aren't designed this way; it would be cheaper than having a higher resolution (since it's only twice as many total sub-pixels instead of four times as many) and look about as good.

Part of me misses my Trimon monitor. But maybe I'll appreciate this more, once I get used to it. I tried looking at a bit of Ghosts of the Abyss, and it looked spectacular. :)

From what I've seen, all passive 3D monitors have been discontinued. Passive 4K TVs are available, but they cost thousands of dollars. Since for now active 3D is the only affordable way of having 3D, I guess I'll stick with it.
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