An ad hoc 3D television comparison

Sunday, December 11th, 2011 at 07:55pm

A few months ago I conducted an ad hoc comparison of two 3D televisions.

The equipment involved included:

  • my 40″ Samsung 200Hz television
  • Hamish’s 40″ Sony 100Hz television
  • my Sony Bluray player
  • Hamish’s Playstation 3

This resulted in three test setups:

  • Sony television and Playstation 3
  • Samsung television and Playstation 3
  • Samsung television and Sony Blu-ray player.

For each setup we compared:

  • a car racing game in 3D
  • a scene from an animated 3D movie

The car racing game was observed to be less jerky on my television than it was on Hamish’s. The output from the Playstation was 720 at 60Hz. In this situation the higher refresh rate of my television is what gave the better result. We don’t know exactly how fast the 3D runs, does a 60Hz signal result in a 120Hz output once it alternates between eyes? If so then it is clear why 100Hz was not as smooth.

Watching the animated movie was different as we didn’t notice any real difference between the televisions. In this case the output was 1080 at 24Hz. If it was really outputting 48Hz, that is well within the 100Hz of the Sony.

What was quite surprising to us was that we noticed an improvement when the same scene was played through the Sony Blu-ray player instead of the Playstation 3. Is the Blu-ray player handling the playback better in hardware than the Playstation was handling in software?

Of course none of this really matters as I have not yet and I don’t have any plan to actually watch a movie in 3D. It has also been a long time since I have played games, but even then that would be on the computer, not on a console.

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