SAMSUNG 3D TV PRICE, SAMSUNG 3D TV REVIEWS AND SAMSUNG 3D TV SPECIFICATIONS.

Samsung has just launched it’s 10 models of 3D Televisions in Delhi, India. Samsung will also be the first company to manufacture the 3D TVs in India at its Chennai and Noida factories. Wow! It’s really a great work.

Samsung 3D TVs automatically convert all 2D video to 3D. Monster vs Aliens 3D DVD to be bundled with all Samsung 3D TVs, 2 active shutter 3D glasses also bundled with TVs. Samsung is also launching 3D Blu-ray players.

This amazing TV will be available in next week with the price tag RS. 1,29,000 to Rs. 4,35,000 for 40 – 65 inches in LED, LCD and Plasma versions.

Samsung launched it’s 3d TV series in US, UK & now in India and planing to launch all over the world. Samsung App Store for Internet-enabled TVs will be available soon.

I turned next to Sky’s new 3D channel. And I have to say that this actually got me much more excited about 3D than the Monsters Vs Aliens Blu-ray.

For the most part, the channel is currently showing a show-reel culled from content Sky has shot in 3D, including a Ricky Hatton boxing match, Premiership football matches, a golf tournament, a rugby match, a tennis match, and a ballet performance of Swan Lake. Though last Friday I was also able to watch and record at home the full Chelsea versus Manchester United game, first shown to pubs and clubs on April 3rd.

On a technical level, the Sky footage seems considerably less affected by the ghosting problem than the Blu-ray film. I really don’t know why this is the case; it could be a result of Sky’s seemingly already well-developed sense of how to film for 3D; it could be down to the slightly reduced resolution of the Sky image; or it could be down to the way the Sky images use a side-by-side 3D approach rather than the alternate frame Full HD approach used by the Blu-ray. But whatever the cause, it’s definitely less glaring a problem.

That’s not to say it’s not a problem at all, though. Golf, in particular, with its huge depth of field shots as players look down fairways, found some distant trees appearing with ghostly echoes of themselves that were as much as an inch out of sync with the main image.

Even so, I generally found watching Sky’s 3D content less tiring and more engaging than I found watching the Blu-ray. A sensation probably due to the 3D effect actually adding more to my enjoyment of sport and stage productions than it did to my experience of Monsters Vs Aliens.

The 3D effect on sport, for instance, truly improves your understanding of what’s going on. If somebody crosses a football over from the side line, in 3D you can tell exactly where the ball is going and who is likely to get on the end of it. Or in tennis, you get a much greater sense of ball speed, spin and angles with 3D than 2D. Or if someone kicks for goal at rugby, you almost feel like you’re flying through the air with the ball as it loops toward the posts.

3D also delivers big-time when it comes to the sense of scale of a sporting or arts venue. The first shots you see of Old Trafford, for instance, will take your breath away. And the effect gets even stronger during shots from pitch level showing the players foregrounded against the vastness of the stadium behind them.

Of course, so long as there’s any ghosting to be seen in Sky’s 3D images, for whatever reason, there will always be plenty of people who might rather just stick with their tried, tested and clean as a whistle HD sports and concert footage. So let’s hope the ghosting can be ironed out as 3D technology advances.

But for real sports and arts aficionados, even with a little ghosting to contend with, on the evidence of what Sky is already achieving, 3D is capable of being a terrific addition to your home entertainment experience.

There are a couple of side points to mention here. First, despite Sky’s signal not being Full HD in resolution on account of it having to use the side-by-side 3D approach rather than the Full HD alternating shutter approach, the images I watched still certainly looked HD, not standard def.
                      
Second, Sky hasn’t finalised its system for embedding - into HDMI v1.3 data packets - the data necessary to tell a TV to automatically turn to its side-by-side 3D display system. So you have to select the correct 3D mode on the TV manually. But Sky believes it will have sorted this out by the time the 3D channel goes properly live to home users by the Autumn.

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SAMSUNG 3D TV REVIEWS AND SPECIFICATIONS

Samsung, the manufacturer whose model we are testing, is providing two free pairs with its £2,000 television. But others have said consumers will need to pay for the spectacles separately, which seems a bit of a swizz if you are already forking out for the equivalent of a few months' mortgage on a new set.

We soon find out that the glasses are slightly too sophisticated for their own good. They work using so-called shutter technology, transforming the blurry picture on the television into amazing crisp images that appear to leap out of the screen.
                   
Or at least that's the theory. And when I have tested out the glasses at electronics trade shows over the last two years, they have worked very well.

The glasses operate by tricking your brain, allowing you to take in two separate images – one for the left eye and one for the right eye. The glasses do this by rapidly alternating between lenses, shutting off one eye at a time. You don't notice it doing this, except for when you first put them on and there is a strange flickering sensation as they warm up.

The problem comes when you get up to make a cup of tea, or stop an argument between a two-year-old and her older brother – a frequent occurrence in our house when Angelina Ballerina is up against Total Wipeout. The glasses are clever enough to know when you are no longer watching the screen and switch to normal dark glasses mode. Turn back to the screen, and it takes another few seconds for the glasses to kick into 3D mode. This soon becomes annoying.

Some medics in America have warned you could get headaches while wearing the glasses. None of us suffered from this, though the children did endlessly fidget to stop them slipping off and the instruction manual includes an impressive warning list to cover the manufacturer from any pregnant Avatar fan in a litigious mood. My favourite caveat is: "Some 3D videos many surprise and overexcite viewers."

This was certainly our first reaction, once we had sussed out the glasses. The images are astonishing. What's impressive is not so much the bullets that come flying out of the screen, as the depth of field that 3D gives. You really feel you are having to peer over the heads of the first row of the Twickenham crowd to watch the rugby; when the ballerinas do their jetés, one leg is clearly in front of the other. That sounds unremarkable, but if you have spent a lifetime watching 2D television programmes, it is hard to stop yourself wanting to reach into the screen.

But the wow factor wears off after a while, and the quality is just not as good as the 3D you get in the cinema. Sometimes, the blurry double image appears even when you are wearing the glasses.

Undoubtedly these snags will be ironed out over time, and maybe even before they hit the shelves in May. But the most enthusiastic reaction I could muster from Felix was, “it’s good”. Alexander, his older brother, was a bit more positive with: “yeah, it’s fun”. Celia, the two year old, had a tantrum when she couldn’t get the glasses to fit.

The industry – not just the manufacturers in Asia but also the studios in Hollywood – of course think 3D will be more than just “fun”. Millions ride on it being more than that. "It's quite simply the entertainment revolution of our time," said DreamWorks' chief executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg. "It's as important as the introduction of sound or colour."

Hmm. Katzenberg may be a genius film producer, but I’m not sure he’s got three young children who would break the glasses within weeks, if not days, and who have the ability to flick through twenty channels in the time it takes to boil a kettle.

And that is the other stumbling block for 3D. While Samsung, Panasonic, Sony and LG will all have 3D sets and 3D Blu-ray players on the shelf by May, there is precious little to watch in 3D.

The only content we could view on our set was a disc of Monsters vs Aliens, an animated film that comes free with the Samsung set and 3D Blu-ray player, and a collection of ballet, rugby and tennis clips provided by Sky. And this content, totalling about two hours' worth of footage, is pretty much the sum of 3D currently available in Britain.

Sky announced yesterday that its long-awaited 3D channel will launch in April, allowing the 1.6 million customers with an expensive HD box to enjoy 3D on their 3D telly. But for the first few months it will be a preview channel, showing clips and no more. Not until the start of the next football season will there be any live 3D broadcasts to people’s homes. And it will take a while for the studios to start releasing films, such as Up and Alice in Wonderland, in 3D format.

John Kempner, John Lewis’s head TV buyer – and as a result one of the key people who will decide what will end up in our living rooms – is excited, but believes only a handful of “early adopters” will buy the first sets.

“Will they become as standard as colour sets did in the 1970s? I’m not sure. But one thing’s certain: these 3D sets are still amazing quality 2D televisions. And £2,000 is not a ridiculous amount of money to pay for the very top-of-the-range flat-screen set.”
                                                   
He’s right. One of the best things about the television is not the 3D itself, but the sharpness of the 2D images it also produces when in normal mode. And that might prove the ultimate selling point – buy a great new TV. It also has 3D. Just don't let your kids fight over the glasses.

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