I was ready to be underwhelmed by my experience with the first Blu-ray 3D title to be released to stores Tuesday (June 22), Sony’s “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.
The picture on both the Samsung LED 3D TV fed by a Samsung Blu-ray 3D player and the Panasonic plasma 3DTV sourced by a Blu-ray 3D player was perfectly bright, just as crisp and vivid as any 2D HiDef image, and the 3D was very obvious from the first moment and consistently apparent throughout.
The depth and space between objects in the foreground and background in every scene was very obvious, unlike some movies in theaters, and many times the fingers of a character and other objects projected slightly in front of the screen towards the viewer.
And this was in a brightly-lit Best Buy store in Duarte, Ca. where a clerk called Austin was eager to sit with me for quite awhile and test the 3D disc that he had not seen. He had just sold a Samsung 3D home theater system to a customer moments earlier.
His immediate reaction to “Cloudy” was, “This is way better than “Monsters vs. Aliens.” So impressed was Austin that he even called over a couple co-workers to check it out with us.
The 3D in the teaser for “Open Season” jumped out of the screen in the first moments — the blades of grass — and was consistently strong, moreso than the 3D impact in the teaser for “Monster House.”
Austin says the relatively low entry level pricing ($2,500 for 3DTVs) has many customers coming in to shop and buy, and he says today’s customer chose the Samsung because the LED screen is much thinner and the system offered more Internet services.
One area of early concern should be the durability (flimsiness) of those 3D glasses at $150 a pop. Austin said at this relatively small shop alone they have already gone through four pairs of broken Samsung glasses — just from regular in-store usage by customers, particularly kids. And the lone pair of Panasonic 3D glasses on hand had a broken right-side ear-piece. As a result, Austin was initially hesitant to show me the Panasonic system until I told him I didn’t mind holding the glasses to my face for awhile.
There are number of semi-intuitive extra steps to get the 3D version of the movie on the TV, and initial start-up took a bit longer and froze a couple times on the Samsung during loading and while trying to access different program features. But overall, both systems and the disc played fairly smoothly and quickly.
Best of all, the brightness of the image felt even more vivid, and the 3D felt even a little more dynamic than the 3D in some movie theaters.
Perhaps even more telling, the 3D on “Cloudy” instantly sold Austin, who said he was going to try to get a copy of this disc to use as a demo in the store.
— By Scott Hettrick