There has been a lot of hype and excitement around Toshiba’s auto-stereoscopic 3D technology. We have purposely not hyped it up here at MTBS because there was never a formal announcement about auto-stereo 3D HDTVs for consumers (though it was heavily misconstrued and promoted this way by other media sources).
The verdict is in on what the core technology is and what’s being offered.
As you can see, this is a lenticular based technology offering up to nine views in stereoscopic 3D. The nature of lenticular is you can only view stereoscopic or multi-view content, and not traditional 2D material. Another problem with lenticular is it dramatically reduces the resolution in 3D because the underlying high resolution panel that drives the image, gets divided by the number of available views.
This is great technology for advertising, coin operated arcade games, slot machines, and more. Unfortunately, until there is a dramatic innovation with auto-stereo solutions, we don’t see this as the living room technology it is being falsely pumped up to be. It’s too expensive, the resolution isn’t high enough, and it doesn’t have the flexibility to show 2D content. Barrier auto-stereo technology works under different principals, but it also faces the problem of drastically reduced resolution in 3D mode.