In the uphill battle to keep 3D TV alive, a small victory has been achieved: A petition that calls on LG to revive 3D in their 2018 OLED models has surpassed 10,000 online signatures.
It took about two months to reach the milestone, but nonetheless it’s an impressive number, especially when you consider we’re talking about the world of home theater and a segment of it that’s in danger of dying off.
The Grim Situation
In case you haven’t heard, none of the major TV manufacturers will be producing a 3D TV this year. If you see a 3D set at Best Buy right now, consider its days numbered. As you might imagine, for those that enjoy 3D at home, this is a depressing development.
The petition to LG reads much like a letter from a lonely ex-boyfriend:
“LG, please reconsider the choices made in 2017 – it would be a shame that the passive 3D that LG developed on UHD OLED TVs is consigned to the history books because of the marketing brightness war with Samsung (who never really did 3D right with their active solution either).
Please just give us consumers an option rather than tossing 3D entirely – many other manufacturers tossed it because they couldn’t do it properly. LG can and did and hopefully will again.”
It’s a great point. By all accounts, the cost to include passive 3D functionality is modest, so the theory that this is all about cutting costs rings hollow–especially on the still quite pricey OLED sets. If someone is shelling out $3,000 for a TV, there’s no reason it shouldn’t have every bell and whistle available. The rave reviews that come from most people who see 3D on an OLED screen is even more of a reason to keep it alive. Heck, there’s plenty of praise for 3D on mid-tier models, like LG’s UH8500. Check the comments from BestBuy.com:
Hey, Samsung! You Too!
The Keep 3D alive movement isn’t just relegated to LG, though. Spotted among the signatures on the petition is a link to a separate petition, this one urging Samsung to reconsider dropping 3D.
“We are asking Samsung to please consider bringing 3D back to their future 4k televisions. I along with many other loyal Samsung customers were very disappointed to hear that Samsung was taking this feature out of their 2017 4k QLED flagship line. Many of us have invested lots of money into 3D movies and have finally built respectable libraries and to have to throw that money down the drain would be unthinkable.”
That petition just got underway and has less than 50 signatures as of this writing.
Will thousands of 3D enthusiasts be able to get these massive corporations to throw them a bone next year? We’ll most likely have to wait until CES 2018 to find out.
OLED65ep: Need to keep it up
Thanks for the article- I’m not behind either petition but am doing all I can to promote them. I’ve been a 3D fan for decades and 3D Blu-Ray was a dream come true! Now that it’s being threatened with extinction I’m absolutely devastated! True that it hasn’t taken off as big as the industry would have liked, but there’s several reasons for that- mainly their expectations were simply too HIGH. Surround sound has been around for about 35 years now and STILL not everyone has it; technologies like this need to be given plenty of TIME to grow and catch on!
I’m not exactly loaded but I first managed to get a Sharp 3D (active) TV in 2012, the 3D on that wasn’t great but it was still enjoyable. In light of this year’s news, I sold that TV and bought a 75-inch LG with passive 3D, just in case this is the last chance I’ll ever have to get one. The 3D on it is MILES ahead of the Sharp TV, much brighter with much less crosstalk (double-images). The Sharp used battery-powered glasses that cost $50 each so I only had 3 of them, the LG uses the exact same glasses that you get at movie theaters so cost for them is a non-issue, and they’re COMPLETELY unintrusive to use even over regular glasses. The earlier TVs that used these glasses had a trade-off in picture quality, but that’s not a problem on the newer 4K TVs. If EVERY TV did 3D like this, there’d be far fewer complaints about the picture quality and the inconvenience of getting and using the glasses!
I’ve been buying EVERY 3D Blu-Ray that’s come out as well (with a few exceptions, like The Hobbit movies since those are in the wrong frame rate on disc) and will continue to do so as long as their future is in jeopardy. If 3D does go away then so will my enthusiasm for buying movies (I have literally thousands, and don’t really need to buy any more) and equipment which will mean several thousand fewer dollars for the industry from me. It would be a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
I agree Kendrick. I thought LG would stand out from the crowd as their OLED sets (mine’s an E6) are the toast of the town for doing 3D right. Instead, LG winds up following the crowd. And if it’s because of a few nits of extra light for HDR, more’s the pity.
The question is, is Glass less/Glasses free 3D TV’s on the horizon ? think about the improvements that television manufacturers strive to have, 720p/1080i HDtv to Full 1080p HDtv to 3Dtv to 4K to HDR what’s next, 8k ? the human eye cant see that much detail even if live sports, movies and video games were developed/filmed for that resolution. I’ll agree with LG in that the average customer doesn’t care about 3D, and if we all have 3D in our television sets who’ll be that interested in Glass less/Glasses free 3D TV’s when they arrive ? they what people to upgrade there television sets and glasses free TV’s is enough of a unique feature for people to do just that. The average people possible like 3D but having friends or family visiting and watching a 3D film is too inconvenient until glasses free 3dtv arrives.
Great article! My whole family loves 3D, and so does almost everyone that I know. 10,000 plus signatures is impressive, but when you consider the fact that the majority of consumers don’t even know yet that 3D has been phased out of TVs, the number is even more impressive. The average consumer will still be surprised and shocked to find that their new pricey TV doesn’t include 3D. The number of signatures on the petition so far is probably only a fraction of the amount of 3D fans that exist, because most people just aren’t aware that this is happening. Companies are making a big mistake by abandoning 3D televisions at this point.