It takes time to get to know any new piece of AV gear, and a prototype glasses-free 3D UHDTV is no exception. It's important to get past the initial "wow factor" that is a part of the early-adopter experience, which can often lead to irrational exuberance. I documented my first impressions in the Ultra-D Glasses-Free 3D TV Hands-On Experience thread. Now, my two-month experience with a 46-inch display featuring Ultra-D's autostereoscopic system is over. Thanks to the extended test period, I have a more nuanced view of its capabilities. As a bonus, I also have 3D footage of the Ultra-D display doing its thing; if you have a 3D display, you'll probably want to check out the videos at the end of this article. I filmed the Ultra-D TV using a 3D camcorder, including real-time adjustment of the "3D factor" If you love 3D, or work with 3D, then the good news is Ultra-D performs better than you'd expect—I repeatedly found myself marveling at how realistic good 3D looked on the display. In fact, the quality of the 3D was so good that it spoiled me. However, if you are a 3D skeptic, I somehow doubt that glasses-free technology is going to change your mind about the format. Even though I love 3D, and Ultra-D makes it very easy to watch 3D content, I learned it is not something I want to look at all of the time—after a while 3D loses its impact. Much to my surprise, the novelty does wear off. In my view, 3D—like dedicated home theater—is best saved for content that deserves the enhanced presentation. Fortunately, the selection of such content continues to grow, especially with 3D releases of movies in Blu-ray and Vudu HDX formats. 3D isn’t going anywhere, and it's only going to get better now that technology makes it easy to watch. When I consider the potential applications for Ultra-D displays, the most prominent ones are public: From malls to museums to classrooms, I can imagine how useful 3D could be to help illustrate a point, or make an advertisement more compelling. What's harder to imagine is a family viewing 3D content day-in and day-out. Eventually, your eyes want a break, when that happens, 2D starts to look very appealing. Then after some time passes, 3D regains its luster—it's as if a tolerance to 3D builds up with too-frequent viewing. Because 3D can become fatiguing, it's important that an autostereoscopid display performs well as a 2D display. Ultra-D uses a combination of optics and video processing to create the illusion of 3D. On the optical side, there is a lenticular film on the front of the panel. For 3D, the Ultra-D works as advertised—at its best, it produced some of the best 3D I've seen on a consumer display. However, the optical film is still there if you turn 3D off, and that has significant implications worth discussing. Although the system uses a UHD/4K panel, it's unclear how much of that resolution is available when viewing 2-D content. It's quite clear to my eyes that the Ultra-D optical system reduces the overall resolution of the display when it is in 2D mode. When I tried to use the Ultra-D TV with my computer, text looked unusually rough. I don’t know if the perceived 2D resolution will improve when Ultra-D TVs go into production; as it stands, Ultra-D's optics visibly impact 2D resolution—at least when using the display as a computer monitor. For what it's worth, video content looked great in 2D.When Ultra-D equipped TVs hit store shelves, potential buyers need to take a close look at the impact of the resolution loss to see if it remains an issue. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to see a pre-production model, at which time I'll take another look at how Ultra-D equipped displays deal with 2D content. I'm excited to see what further improvements the next iteration of Ultra-D might bring to 3D reproduction. An improved screen with a higher refresh rate would go a long way towards addressing the issues I observed with the development sample—namely, motion from 24p Blu-ray source material was not as smooth as it would be on a TV with a higher refresh rate. The other area where I expect to see significant improvement is the conversion process; while 3D video was smooth most the time, the system occasionally struggled. According to Leo, that's a byproduct of using a small PC—the SeeCube—to do the heavy lifting. The optimized code that makes its way into production televisions will run directly on a Qualcomm mobile processor, it is supposed to perform better than the SeeCube I was using. I hope so because a number of demo clips that I played directly off the SeeCube were essentially perfect-looking; noticeably smoother than native 3D Blu-ray content that was converted to Ultra-D. I asked Leo about the disparity, and he said it was because the demo clips were already converted to Ultra-D format. Pre-converted Ultra-D footage played with uncanny smoothness, the 3D looked perfect I've received quite a few questions about Ultra-D's availability. According to Leo Riley, StreamTV Networks Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Ultra-D equipped TVs will come to the US in either Q4 of 2014, or Q1 of 2015—after an initial launch in China. If the real-time processing in production Ultra-D TVs is as smooth as what I saw in the demo clips, the future of glasses free 3D looks very bright indeed. 3D Video Clips of Ultra-D About a month into the testing, AVS member Joseph Clark made a very generous gesture—he loaned me a 3D JVC camcorder. The hope was that the 3D effect would come through in the captured footage of the TV. The experiment was a success; as a result, I recorded a significant amount of 3D footage of Ultra-D doing its thing. The resulting videos are on YouTube, in both side-by-side and line-alternate 3D formats. Regarding formats: Side-by-side (SBS) format 3D videos should work with most 3D TVs, although you might need to manually select the SBS viewing mode using your display device. Also, I rendered the video in line-alternate format. If you have a passive 3D HDTV, the line-alternate version will preserve a lot more detail than the side-by-side version, and it'll work without employing any special viewing modes—you just need to make sure you are getting a genuine 1080p stream. Joseph Clark's 3D Footage of the Missouri Botanical Garden Side-by-side format (half resolution) - View in 1080p full-screen with SBS conversion Line-alternate format (for passive 3D HDTVs) - View in 1080p full-screen Sample clips from Movies and the Ultra-D "SeeCube" Demo Side-by-side format (half resolution) - View in 1080p full-screen with SBS conversion Line-alternate format 1 (L/R normal) - View in 1080p full-screen Line-alternate format 2 (L/R reversed) - View in 1080p full-screen