Passive vs Active is like VHS vs Beta all over again

It is not quite the same type of issue!!!! With VHS vs BETA you had to purchase and then later buy video tapes of different format. Pre-recorded tapes had to produced in two formats. The only similarity is in tradeing between two different homes or two different machines in the same home.

In passive vs active glasses - the source material - Blu-ray Player, Blu-ray Discs, Satellite, Cable, or PC - remains completely the same and is totally compatible with either type of system. The issue using your glasses of one type on a friends TV of another or when you have two 3D TVs in the house and they are of two different types. While an issue, not really as common as people are indicating here.

With VHS vs Beta when one format won out the machines people paid good money for in the other format were useless. This is similar to Bluray vs HDDVD.

If one 3D technology dominates eventually, the equipment and source material are still useful for the other technology. So users don't really lose by the outcome.

The big point is in five years, if the TV is still working at all, it will be compatible with the same 3D sources as it is now. If new types of 3D source signals become avalible, both the current passive and current active will be equally incompatible. Passive and Active can co-exist!!!

I doubt it and Active is selling under expectations. Passive from LG is now fixed and shows 3million pixels on the screen so there is really no advantage to the darker flicker prone more expensive active 3D.

Does anyone have photos of a Beta and VHS tape that can post? Like a side by side comparison? I also would like to know what were the main differences between the two. Did one have better picture quality than the other? Were they both the same size and were the costs the same?


Thanks

Yes is has 3 million pixels. Half of them are black.

You missed the point. The point is either active or passive work with all current 3D source signals and source equipment so both can continue to exist. Actvie vs Passive is not a format war because the glasses are not the format, they are a part of the display choice, just like choosing between Plasma, LCD, DLP maybe in the future OLED etc.

A format war is when source equuipment and source signals are not comptiabible with each other. BETA and VHS used different cassette devices that would not be interchangable but even if they used the same cassette, the actual method of organizing and recording the information on the magnetic tape was different. When you selected a format you also had to be supported by the content suppliers. If they did not supply content in your format you had nothing to watch. Same thing with Blu-ray vs HD-DVD.

The source formats and source devices have ZERO influnce on which type of glasses. The TV, if it is a full 3D TV, is what the glasses have to match, not the source signal or source device. If Plasma, LCD, DLP, OLED etc can all exist together, then Passive and Active can all exist together.

The main cost of the "format" going forward really will be the cost of the source signal. Each Blu-ray you rent or purchase, each download you get, each pay-per-view movie. THE FORMAT IS NOT THE GLASSES IT IS THE SOURCE SIGNALS AND DEVICES. The glasses are only important to the individual TV you purchase which normally is not a frequent purchase over the life of the TV.

If you perfer passive, then buy passive; if you perfer active, then buy active - one does not need to win over the other. It is the incorrect pushing of this argument that is hurting the furthering of 3D TVs, not fact that there are two types of glasses systems.

Not many VCRs out there any more let alone Beta-Max. It did cost more than the VCRs but the main reason it lost out was content. More studios went with the VCR format. The killer app was the porn industry went almost exclusively VCR. For the 1st time people could watch porn in their home without going to a sleazy theater.

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=betamax

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=vhs

http://www.mediacollege.com/video/fo...tamax-vhs.html

This article says the main reason is that Beta stored 60 minutes while VHS stored 3 hours. There are other factors, but that seems to be one of the main points.

Just to be anal, both VHS and BETA are VCRs. VCR = Video Cassette Recorder and is generic term for a video recording/playback device that records on to a magentic tape contained in a plastic cassette.

VHS = Video Helical Scan and described the method of setting up the video record/play heads designed by JVC. Supported at the beginning by 5 other manufacturers and many Home Video Companies.

BETA = Sony designed system to place video head also on an spinning durm. Supported only by Sony and some of the same Home Video Companies.

None of this is really important except that VHS and BETA are formats and VCR is a device category. As I said, I am just being anal about terms.

Like my one eye that can't see in active....


I mean the new interpolated system they have it was explained in FP tech forum..

It shows 3million full to each eye... they are not black.

I don't that that they can exist in the same market ecosystem.. Like the OP active is going the way of the dodo slowly but surely.

What are you talking about?

It's a fact of physics. The hardware pattern applied to the screen causes every second line of resolution to be black because the lines are polarized opposite the lens of the glasses. It stays black all the time. Did you take physics in school? Things viewed through a lens with an opposite polarization are blacked out. That does not change, ever.

Believe me or not it's up to you. It don't effect the facts.

It's how current passive works. Each eye sees a different image. Half the pixels on the screen, every other line, is visible to the right eye. Half the pixels are seen by the left eye. Thus two images on the screen at once and to each eye through the polarized lens there is a line blacked out, every second line.

That interpolation system you refer to means the display flashes, on 540 lines, the information your right eye (for example) should see for those lines and 1/120 sec later the display flashes the information that would be on the 540 black lines. The black lines remain black. They have to.

This video explains it better than I can http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETc3Ep3wcEk

It will NOT be like VHS and Betamax. Passive and active only differ in the screen and glasses tech. There is no difference in what content they are compatible with.

Also, active is NOT definitively superior to passive. Current passive tech wins my vote for its ability to display the left and right eye views simultaneously, with no motion flickering. That combined with light loss, comfort and price add up to a superior overall product and a superior value compared to active in a lot of people's eyes.

Buy whatever you prefer, there's no wrong opinions except uninformed ones.

You are correct I forgot the VHS term so I substituted VCR. That was a long time ago.

Symtex: As I said, have your preference, just remember that active is not definitively superior in picture quality, just resolution, whereas passive wins brightness and colors, motion, and no flicker whether you notice the flicker or not.

That You Tube video posted by Robust is the best explanation I have seen explaining that the eyes see passive resolutions which are 1920x540 and do not add them to make 1080P but see each one as 1920x540 otherwise there would be no 3D.

To sum it up. BETA had better video quality than VHS, but VHS had longer recording times (capacity). In the end consumers opted for the 8 hour recording capability of VHS over the better video quality of BETA. Also VHS was a more open format, and BETA was controlled by Sony. So they lost that one, but won out on BlurRay .

I remember my dad bought a BETA due to the better video quality, it was great until they stopped renting movies for them...

The above is absolutely correct - I couldn't have explained it better.

I lived through this era and I had two recorders. A Beta for things I recorded because of the higher quality and a VHS for prerecorded rental tapes.

Active is superior in another important way too, viewing angle. Active has a far wider vertical viewing angle than Passive does and a wider horizontal viewing angle too. This is an important consideration for family viewing in an average sitting/living room in my opinion.

Vertical angle is a problem but horizontal issues are overblown. As far to the side as you need to go to find the limits, by that time the perspective of the TV screen and 3D illusion are skewed beyond enjoyment imo.

You're missing the point.

Oh, Crap THIS thread again. "sigh "

I have an active Panasonic, and I watched a Passive LG at best buy. The active seems to give more Depth.

Under completely identical circumstances- size, viewing distance, TV settings, content, etc- they will have the same depth.

Actually, active shutter loses 3D quality points because it doesn't show the left and right images at the same time. In 60fps content on a 120hz active shutter display, our brain pairs up 60 properly synced images and 60 improperly synced images. If objects are moving relatively fast, we can see a flicker where it looks like an object is in two places at one time. If things aren't moving quickly we see no such disparities. Depth in fast action movies suffers with active shutter, not so with passive interlaced and dual projector passive.

The exception is single projector passive and non-interlaced passive TVs. They can't output two simultaneous, differently filtered images at the exact same time. So they alternate the left and right frames and left and right eye polarization, just like active alternates LR frams and LR shutters.

I noticed these differences the very first second I saw 3D content in the theater. It was a single projector RealD or LieMax presentation of Avatar. The previews showed Alice in Wonderland, I believe. It disappointed me that it didn't animate like film, it flickered every time there was any sort of movement.

I've since done A/B tests with active shutter and passive displays with the same content, and passive wins. The Star Wars trailer, most notably, looked like a mess during action snippets on the active shutter set. But on the passive, everything looked like solid mass and it slightly changed my perception of the movie a little more towards the positive, less cynical end.

Most of the time I don't see flicker with my active shutter DLP-link projector setup, but I do see it with certain kinds of movement. The worst is in panning shots on 24fps Blu-rays. For example, the title menu of any of the 3D Toy Story movies. Granted, this is a kind of shot that doesn't look good in 2D either because of the low frame rate, but the shutter glasses seem to exasperate it. 60fps content (video games) seems to mitigate this problem, both because the higher frame rate will capture motion better (less differences between one frame and the next) and because any instance of tearing is potentially only there for 1/60th of a second and less noticeable. That said, tearing is certainly there if I look for it at 60fps, but in my experience it's usually content below 30 fps where the flicker and tearing is most noticeable.

For those keeping score, I think active is great and I'm very happy with it, but this is the one issue where I see room for improvement and a clear advantage of passive displays.

Oh yeah, I only mentioned 60fps because it was easier to do the math. I have no idea how they do 24fps film content up to 120hz. 5 refreshes per frame x 24 = 120 but 5 refreshes per frame doesn't evenly go into 2 eyes.

I don't really understand the math of it either, it would seem that 24fps at 60hz per eye would mean fewer hz of tearing. It may be I'm seeing something different, but no doubt, movement with low fps in active takes a picture quality hit.