The biggest complaint about 3D in home electronics? Okay, there are plenty: content, price, general apathy–but generally when people are finding something to whine about, all eyes tend to turn to those pesky 3D glasses. They get lost, get scratched, and will no doubt be eventually be sat on more then a few times during their living room career
Nintendo made a big splash when it introduced its glasses-free 3DS console of over the summer. The logical question quickly became: when will the rest of the industry release their own glasses-free 3D products? Of course there are a number of hurdles to deal with when implementing such a technology on a product the size of an HDTV.
Toshiba, apparently, has overcome these. This week at CEATEC in Tokyo, the company announced plans to sell a glasses-free LCD TV. The set will go on sale in December–in Japan. No word on an international release for the set. Boo.
Of course there are other limitations with the technology. The first seems to be size. The set will only be available at 12 and 20 inches–pretty tiny, given the fact that today’s sets are topping off at well over 100 inches. The second limitation is, you guess it, price. The 12 inch set runs 120,000 yen ($1,440). The 20 inch set is double that price.
Toshiba doesn’t seem to expect to be selling a lot of these things. The company will be producing 2,000 of the sets a month, compared to the 1.25 million total LCD TVs the company ships a month.
Sometimes it’s just important to say that you’re first, right? Given how competitive the HDTV market is, at present, it certainly couldn’t hurt.
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