BBC Says 3D TVs Are Dead

Adam Frisch FSF · February 23, 2017

But what's the deliverable for a 4K home TV? There's no consumer format that supports it as far as I know and streaming it over the net is going to compress it so much it'll look no better than 2K. What exactly are we going to watch on these tellys?

John E Clark · February 23, 2017

But what's the deliverable for a 4K home TV? There's no consumer format that supports it as far as I know and streaming it over the net is going to compress it so much it'll look no better than 2K. What exactly are we going to watch on these tellys?

Both ATSC 3.0 (US and former NTSC countries) and DVB-T2 (The rest of the world...) standards support 4K/UHD, etc.

It is my guess that most over the air broadcasters will opt for packing more 'sub channels' in to the spectrum, rather than broadcasting a 4K/UHD single stream.

In the US there has been a squashing of TV broadcasters in to fewer 'channels', and 'repacking' multiple stations on a single transmission channel.

Then there's mobile...

Phil Rhodes · February 23, 2017

The point is not about better pictures (3D proved that - despite all the effort, it usually looked terrible.)

The point is that if you take a 4K master, even if you compress it so much it barely matters, or pan the camera, or use a diffusing filter, or sit more than three feet from a fifty-inch screen, or be slightly shortsighted, or do any of the other things which can effectively destroy the resolution advantage...

...you can still charge for it.

The ultimate arbiter here is not what works better or what produces more enticing pictures. What matters is what some suit thinks they can sell.

George Ebersole · February 25, 2017

Eh, sure, but I thinkn there's a bit more there, otherwise there'd be no point in experimenting with 3D.

I think the real pitfall or false-promise of 3D is that our minds already can interpolate 2D images into a 3D virtual environment. I've got a movie running right now ("Just Tell me what you Want" with Alan King and Ali MacGraw). I'm experiencing a 3-dimensional environment by virtue of innately knowing the physical world in which the characters inhabit; office, apartment, cars, store fronts, etc.

Creating a mechanism to create another layer of information for something my brain does automatically, is novel, but it's ... er, I think it's akin to putting two layers of frosting on a cake. Even if you have both vanilla and chocolate frosting on the cake of your choice, you're still going to experience the same sweet flavor. Ditto with 3D technology.

It's novel and interesting, but unlike color or sound, we already experince 3 virtual dimensions. Sound was added because we experience the world with sound. Ditto with color. The 3D world is already captured in the 2D image. But I'm repeating myself here, and possibly rambling.

Again, just my take. Sorry for the rant. I should be out grabbing stock city footage someplace.

Keith Walters · February 26, 2017

Parallax is just one of many physical aspects of a scene your eye and brain use to conjure up a 3-D image.
Depth of field is vitally important, otherwise you get the "walking cardboard cutout" effect as seen on a surprising number of big-budget features. Choice of correct focal length and camera placement produce subtle distortions of perspective that give further clues as to where an object actually is with respect to the POV.

Most of the Marvel Studios features are shot almost entirely green-screen, with the parallax and other visual clues added later by software, before matting into the background.