IFA 08: First test of a 120 Hz 3D LCD

We've been bringing you the 3D monitor saga for months now.  Everybody's been waiting for these 120 Hz LCD screens, which can show either 120 frames per second continuously or to flip continuously between two 60 fps feeds, one for the left eye and one for the right eye.  When paired up with an NVIDIA graphics card and a special pair of glasses are supposed to be capable of showing 3D images by constantly switching between an image for the left eye and one for the right eye.

Until today, though, we had never actually seen these special glasses.  But here they are, at the IFA:


We had expected them to be connected via a cable, but the great news that they’re wireless.  There is a small receiver on the left side of the frame, hidden on the inside, but apart from that they’re light and comfortable.


As soon as you put them on and load the driver on the graphics card, away you go, without any extra software.  The images which appear in double on the screen appear as one single 3D image to users of the glasses.


Let’s answer some of the questions we’ve already ...

• Do games really appear in 3D?  Yes, they do.  It’s not quite like real life yet, but it’s pretty striking all the same;

• Is the image perfect?  And what about the overall effect?  Both are excellent – very impressive, in fact, but you can’t honestly describe them as ‘perfect’ just yet.  Some distortion is noticeable around the edges of certain objects, including a little wobbling.  Nevertheless, the whole thing is a big step forward, especially compared to earlier attempts at 3D, and playing our ‘old’ games again in 3D will be great fun.
  It will be excellent for World of Warcraft, and Crysis too, if the graphics card can hack it.  Even with a game like the Sims, it will be fun to try living in three dimensions rather than two.  On the driving game supplied by NVIDIA as test, taking corners is amazing.

• Do games have to be optimized for 3D to work like that?  No, because it’s the graphics card that takes care of producing two separate images.  You can find a list of compatible games here.

• Do you have to be looking straight at the screen for it to work?  No.  Unlike some other solutions involving glasses that aren’t connected to the graphics card, images appear in 3D regardless of the distance from the screen or the viewing angle.

• Does moving to 60 Hz for each eye, rather than 120 Hz lead to annoying afterglow?  No. The fact that you can see in 3D is so captivating that you don’t even notice other effects that can be a pain on 2D monitors at 60 Hz.

• 60 Hz = a very wobbly image?  No, as long as you don’t look directly at a neon tub while wearing the glasses.   Neon creates a horrible flashing if you look directly at it.

• Why?  Because each lens is in fact a very small LCD screen, and each one turns on and off successively to allow each eye to see the image destined for it.

• And the downsides?  There are two.  Firstly, users might have to think about visual fatigue, which will definitely be higher than with 2D videos.  Secondly, when you put the glasses on the contrast gets a lot worse.  This is entirely understandable, because you have a black LCD screen in front of one of your eyes at all times.  Even when one of the screens is ‘off’ so you can see one of the images, the lens is less than perfectly transparent.

• When and how much?  At the end of the year if we’re lucky.  The price is as yet unknown.