CES: Show exposes incomplete 3-D TV products

EE Times
(01/06/2010 9:38 AM EST)

LAS VEGAS — In order to call a new TV "3-D ready," as many manufacturers here this week at the Consumer Electronics Show claim, what exactly was done to the unit in terms of engineering?

David Naranjo of Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, (center), discusses the company's 3-D adapter for its 3-D-ready DLP projection TV.

It's not a trivial issue for TV system designers, especially when there is no agreement among broadcasters on a single 3-D TV format and Blu-ray has chosen its own 3-D format independent of the pending broadcast format.

David Naranjo, director of product development at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America, said the the answer is a 3-D adapter.

At a pre-CES event Tuesday (Jan. 5), Mitsubishi showed off its own 3-D-ready projection TV, based on DLP technolog. It displays 3-D content from a Blu-ray player. Mitsubishi engineers developed a 3-D adapter for the company's projection TV. The board consists of HDMI 1.4 interface, Mitsubishi's homegrown ASIC based on MIPS core, and video signaling circuitry.

The 3-D adapter comes with "enough horsepower to handle 90 percent of all the different 3-D formats out there -- including top-to-bottom and side-by-side formats," Naranjo said.

. Naranjo said Mitsubishi is so far not selling its MIPS-based ASIC to other 3-D TV makers. While the endgame may still be having consumer chip companies such as Broadcom, NXP or Pixelworks develop a single-chip 3-D TV solution in the future, leading TV vendors including Mitsubishi, Panasonic and Sony have had no choice but to develop their own proprietary ASIC in order to design their own 3-D adapter.

Unlike other CE vendors such as Sony, Samsung and JVC, which have announced agreements with RealD, a 3-D technology company, Mitsubishi appears to be holding out on its final decisions for 3-D technology partners and formats -- at least for now.

Mitsubishi declined to comment further on its 3-D TV strategy.

Mitsubishi did stage its own 3-D-ready TV demonstration here using 3-D glasses that bear the RealD logo.

Naranjo said that doesn't mean the company's 3-D-ready TV must always be viewed using RealD's 3-D glasses, which feature polarized lenses. Mitsuboishi's approach is independent of 3-D format, said Naranjo.

"The secret sauce offered by all these different 3-D technology companies, whether RealD, Sensio or others, is in the encoding algorithm which minimizes the artifacts created by two images -- whether they are placed side-by-side or top-and-bottom." As long as the 3-D adapter used inside a TV decodes that format, "you can watch 3-D content by using different 3-D glasses, including those based on battery-powered LCD shutters," said Naranjo.

Mitsubishi's 3-D TV uses a DLP-based projection TV, rather than LCD TV. Max Wasinger, an executive vice president at Mitsubishi, said DLP offers better 3-D image separation than LCD due to its much higher refresh rate. The higher speed "reduces the visual artifacts," said Wasinger. Readying LCD TV for 3-D, "you need a minimum 240-Hz refresh rate," he added.