Philips' 56-inch HD 3D display has four times the standard resolution of any TV. That's awesome. But the fact it can be watched with your own eyes without wearing silly glasses (or imposing a serious headache) is causing people to check themselves. Because they just might wreck themselves trying to figure out how it works and how to buy it.

Yesterday, Philips unveiled the first Quad Full Autosteroscopic 3D HD TV (see pic below) at a 3D event in Hollywood, after years of development. Quad Full TVs push through data at such a fast rate that they increase a display’s screen resolution to a truly sick 3840x2160 (or 8.29 million pixels), four times the number of pixels of the highest HDTV standard.

That's important for 3D-focused screens, because the data speed and high resolution is needed to create believable, high-quality 3D images.

Autostereoscopic displays are an important innovation because they produce good depth perception without the use of special glasses. As Prof. Neil Dodgson from the University of Cambridge's Graphics and Imaging department notes, street advertisers have used 3-D displays most recently because it's the only one of the four main markets where a glasses-based 3-D solution can't be used.

The three other markets (entertainment, scientific and medical visualization, and remote manipulation) could wait until the unit's resolution capabilities caught up to speed.

But now that the Quad HD 3D TV genie is out of the bag, the technology is ready to go mainstream. Except there's one tiny, but important part that's missing.

Autostereoscopic displays, Prof. Dodgson says, 'have the potential of making an impact in the consumer market. However . . . there needs to be a significant amount of good content, which it is currently lacking.'

Because content is king, Philips will promote their 3D WoW Technology with the TV.
3D WoW rewrites regular HD programming to 3D (see screen shot below) so users can pick for themselves which specific blade in the 3D version of
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will be coming at ya.

Still, Prof. Dodgson does think this TV significantly breaks the previous barrier of entry: the need for a compelling (read: real) 3D
experience with a great image quality.

The Quad 3D TV's large collection of pixels produce images take advantage of the same ol' right-left human optical trick, and its speed slaps the images together at once. This creates a large viewing angle
(160 degrees) and a very high image contrast. Otherwise, the images wouldn't pop out of the screen -- they'd look transparent and uselessly weak.

Philips promises up to 46 views at once, which means the resolution is 23 times better than the crappy 3D you've seen before.

It's fitting that Philips decided to unveil the HD 3D TV at the Biz-Ex conference in Hollywood. As we've mentioned previously, the movie industry is leading this charge with the help of several hardware manufacturers, including camera makers and 3D-enabled HDTV's. Toshiba and Sanyo have previously said they are also working on competing autostereoscopic technologies.

The early word is that this TV will cost approximately $25,000 and will be made available to businesses at first. That's the same amount that
cost the LAPD to take Britney to the hospital last year. Don't you love it when good money is spent so wisely?

Lead Photo: BlueDharma/flickr

Source: Philips 3D