Sharp @ CES 2014

If you followed TV news coming from CES 2014 you probably picked up on Sharp’s massive 85” glasses free 3D display. Everything I heard about it was positive so I made a special trip out to have a look; and was sorely disappointed.

To make it work you need to move to a place where the two white lines on the bottom of the screen align, but it isn’t actually that simple in fact at any time when I was standing at a somewhat normal distance from the display it didn’t even work well enough to call it 3D (the lady running the demo was strangely rude about it when I asked if it was working correctly). After backing up well about 20’ from the display I could see the 3D, but the picture quality was horrible exhibiting the same kind of image shredding apparent when using passive glasses on a low-res display. Frankly if this is the future of 3D, I’d rather go without, and I saw this a fan of 3D technology in the home.

Sharp also had a new technology on display that sits in between 4K and 1080p. While I can understand the value of adding DPI to a display it seems like a strange way to innovate. There will never be native content at that resolution. If 1080p doesn’t cut it at the size you want, get a 4K display you’ll be much happier.