3D television with all guns blazing

By Stuart Kennedy

THE little alien with the big gun pointed his weapon straight at me and I laughed out loud as the barrel poked out of the TV screen by what seemed about a metre and menaced my son and me seated on the couch.

Welcome to 3D TV, a technology set to warm up the top end of the TV market in coming months and probably become a standard TV feature over the next five years.

The gun barrel occupying our lounge room came from a scene in the animated feature Monsters Vs Aliens, one of the few 3D titles on the market so far.

3D TV sets are also scarce. After a few delays, Korean maker Samsung has landed the first 3D-capable TVs on the Australian market with the cheapest 101cm model retailing for $2899 and the top of the range, 140cm LED 3D Series 7 model, reviewed here, going for $4799.

The bill for getting into 3D doesn’t stop with the purchase of a set.

A whole new 3D-capable Blu-ray disc player is required, with the Samsung unit used in this review costing $599. Existing Blu-ray players can’t be upgraded to 3D but there is good news for owners of the Sony PlayStation 3 games console/Blu-ray player, which can be wrangled to play 3D movies with a free downloadable upgrade promised when Sony launches its own 3D TV range in July.

Read the whole story here.