Nine months ago Toshiba showed off one of the first television panels that delivered 3D content without glasses. The results were, well, mixed. (Read: There was 3D, but it was pretty bad. I described the effect as wobbly, dizzying, and nauseating when I wrote about the demo I experienced with the 65-inch display at CES.)
Here at IFA, the company is displaying the same panel technology, but in a 55-inch screen that will make its debut in an actual HDTV, the 55ZL2, which will go on sale in Germany in December. The good news is that Toshiba has improved the panel so that the 3D is no longer physically painful to watch, but, sadly, it's still just not a great experience.
The 55ZL2 is built around an ultra-high-resolution 3,840-by-2,160-pixel Quad Full LED-backlit panel. That's a lot of pixels when you consider today's TVs typically max out at 1,920 by 1,080. But they're necessary to provide a separate left eye and a right eye view for a 3D effect for up to nine viewers. The set also integrates face-tracking technology, which uses a camera below the screen to see how many people are in your living room, and where they're sitting to provide multi-angle 3D so everyone sees the same effect. There's a button on the remote control that you need to push before you start watching to activate the camera.
Toshiba was demoing the panel in a small dark room with three theater chairs placed about eight feet from the screen. From my seat to the far left, I was barely able to discern the 3D effect. Several sports scenes were shown and never did the 3D seem as deep or enveloping as I've experienced watching soccer or tennis on a 3D TV with active shutter glasses. Even sets with less-expensive passive glasses provide a much richer experience. Objects (like soccer balls or moving people) certainly didn't pop, and images felt very shallow.
I walked sideways in front of the screen to check out the effect from different angles and it was similarly disappointing. The 3D effect comes and goes as you move; it's definitely important to stay in one place. And just like with the first panel I saw at CES, the visible vertical lenticular lines on the screen, which are necessary to provide 3D, were distracting. All in all, the experience was pretty underwhelming. And you have to couple that with the fact that there still isn't much 3D content to watch.
With 3D sets struggling to grab a foothold in the HDTV market, the promise of glasses-free viewing is a tempting one. But Toshiba's first iteration just isn't compelling enough to command the premium that the 55ZL2 will likely fetch. Pricing, as you may have guessed, hasn't been announced. Neither has U.S. availability.
For more of the products we've seen at IFA, hit the slideshow below.