One of the upsides of losing all my old blog posts is that my overexcited reactions to 3D TV a few years ago are much harder to stumble across.

Since then, I've become much more disillusioned with the whole 3DTV idea. In my defence, things have changed on the manufacturer side; Philips looked like they were going to lead the way in glasses-free 3D (which was what I saw demonstrated), and have recently announced that they would be abandoning the comnsumer electronics business altogether. As a result, 3D TVs that require special 3D glasses (which by all rights should have been bypassed by better screen technologies) have become the defacto standard for 3D TV.

But more importantly (to me), 3D films have failed to convince me that there is a real benefit to 3D. Too many poorly converted films that were never intended to be 3D in the first place, too many stories about people getting headaches, and nothing that really convinces me that there is anything that 3D really adds to make a fim better.

So the fact that nobody was really touting 3D TV at CES strikes me as a good thing. (For the most part, anyway – 3D games, where the actual universe you are playing in does exist in a 3D space are pretty cool. But films and TV just work better in 2D.)

The really interesting thing to watch over the next year (or two) will be how Smart/Connected TVs get talked about. Will they see a similar dialling-down of attention and excitement? My guess is that yes – the future of TV is "beautiful but dumb"

Some Random Nerd