News

posted on 22 August 2008 14:43

A 3D version of Blu-ray is being considered by the US Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

It held an inaugural taskforce meeting on August 19th at USC Los Angeles. The taskforce's work statement says it is about developing a 3D Blu-ray standard to enable home Blu-ray player viewers to have a stereoscopic 3D viewing experience of a Blu-ray movie.

In effect a 3D Blu-ray disk would have two channels of content on it: one for rthe left eye and one for the right eye. A potential 3D viewing device could be a visor (headset) or a TV with some kind of 3D assist. The processing of the 2-channel encoded information on a 3D Blu-ray disk could be done in a Blu-ray player or in the actual viewing device.

There are companies such as TDVision Systems developing a 3D Blu-ray technology.

We might hope for a 3D Blu-ray viewing experience in 2012 or thereabouts.

Meanwhile Toshiba is prolonging DVD life by selling players which can increase the DVD viewing experience and so narrow the viewing quality gap between Blu-ray and DVD.

Normal DVD quality is termed 480i/p. (480 is the number of lines of vertical resolution on the screen.) Toshiba players, such as its new XDE (eXtended Detail Enhancement) can boost this to 720p, 1080i or 1080p levels by a form of interpolation.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}