Visiting Hisense's booth at IFA is always good for some future-gazing technology — the company often shows off product concepts that it's aiming to actually launch, but often only in China. So obviously, I like to go, find the best ones, and then write articles like this to persuade the company to release them more widely.
And here we are, in one of these articles, because I just saw the world's first micro-LED 3D TV (according to Hisense), and I thought it looked incredible.
The reason why is super-simple: micro-LED's giant brightness levels. Hisense's system uses active-shutter glasses, meaning that the TV shows alternating frames that should be seen by your left and right eyes, and you wear glasses that literally close off the vision of each eye, so that only the correct eye sees the correct frame on the TV.
But these lenses reduce the brightness even when the lens is 'open', and having only half the time to see each frame per eye also reduces perceived brightness, since less light reaches you.
This is the same technique used in the better examples of the old 3D TVs, but it meant that 3D always looked a bit dull.
But that doesn't matter if the TV is ridiculously bright to start with. Hisense's micro-LED model is capable of 10,000 nits of peak brightness, which means that when you're watching through the glasses, the 'dimmed' version of the video still looks like just a normal TV among the best TVs available today.
Colors look super-rich in 3D, and the 3D is super-sharp and detailed because you're getting native 4K resolution because of the active-shutter tech, and the crispness of the 3D effect is super-impressive. In the video I watched, there was no ghosting or stuttering of the image.
The motion looked really smooth and true to what you want from a TV, especially when combined with colors that actually feel rich and like you're getting HDR.
The amount of depth was really impressive, as well — the foreground truly looked like it was jutting out of the screen towards me, and the background felt like there was some real distance to it.
Hisense says that the TV will be able to convert from 2D to 3D in real-time with anything you watch, using a powerful AI-based system, with all the processing handled on the TV itself.
Of course, I'm more interested in breaking out my still-saved 3D Blu-rays of the movies I genuinely loved watching in the format, which were truly filmed with it in mind: Hugo, Pacific Rim, Gravity. I have never watched Avatar at home, because I know it would be a way weaker experience — but I'd watch it on this TV.
And while the dimming problem is the main issue with 3D glasses, I know that for many people the glasses themselves are the problem, and this TV won't solve that.
But man, if I were speccing out a high-end home theater setup (Hisense said the TV would cost over $200,00), I'd absolutely want this in it.
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