PCMag Reports : Tricky, tricky, Toshiba. There's a story going around today that Toshiba's new Qosmio F755 laptop is the world's first laptop with a glasses-free 3D screen, but that's just not true.
Back in 2003, The Sharp Actius RD3D, the real first U.S. laptop to include a parallax barrier 3D screen. At the time, a reviewer said "Our experience viewing still images was outstanding. You do notice an apparent loss of resolution going into 3-D mode (each eye sees 512-by-768 worth of pixels), but the foreground-to-background separation is outstanding. It was even better playing a Spiderman demo movie."
Sharp followed up in 2005 with the Actius AL3D, a $3,495 laptop that a analyst Cisco Cheng said "is already a hit in a variety of markets, including the medical arena, oil and gas industries, and among engineering professionals."
Parallax barrier 3D technology has also cropped up in gaming systems (the Nintendo 3DS) and in phones (on both the HTC EVO 3D and the LG Thrill 4G.) It's never broken through to the mainstream because it can be difficult to stomach for long periods of time: Viewing angles are extremely narrow, and some people have trouble converging the two images, getting headaches, eyestrain, or dizziness from the technology. But it's becoming more common, for the moment, as the entertainment industry tries to push 3D content.
So what's Toshiba doing first here? As far as we can tell, this is the first laptop to allow 3D content to take over only part of the screen. It's a little difficult to tell from Toshiba's press release, but it sounds like the F755 can dynamically convert a chunk of its 2D screen into 3D mode, leaving the rest of the screen in higher-res 2D mode. At $1,699, the F755 is also much cheaper than previous 3D laptops.
Toshiba's also using the laptop's webcam to try to solve the viewing-angle problem, tracking the location of the user's face and angling the content appropriately. PCMag had a hands-on with the technology back in January, and came away with mixed feelings. "It's not quite the same 3D experience you get from movie theaters and flat panels, but the depth is there. Problem is, if you turn your head, sit too far back, or the webcam loses sight of your face, the panel toggles back to 2D mode. This whole toggling back and forth is a problem, which Toshiba acknowledges and is working on a way to force the panel to stay in 3D," reviewer wrote.
