HMD try out for Gizmodo commenters
posted Jun 21st 2008 12:00pm by Juan Aguilarfiled under: news
We had a decent response to our HMD post, but $400 might be a little too steep a price to pay for the Zeiss Cinemiser glasses. Luckily, Zeiss is offering registered Gizmodo readers the chance to try them out free for two weeks. All you have to do is comment on the Gizmodo post announcing the offer with a registered Gizmodo account, then fill out some information on a form Ziess has set up for this offer. Of course, you have to provide them with credit card information (just in case you break the glasses) and a great deal of feedback from the experience, but it’s far more preferable than shelling out $400 to find out you don’t like the glasses.
I have owned/used 6 different pairs of LCD glasses and one thing that is missing from almost ALL reviews of any LCD glasses is how good the optics are combined with the viewing angle of the tiny LCD screen – something extremely important when considering buying some, because poor viewing angle coupled with poor optics means diagonal corners of the display are darker and you try to move them to get an even brightness but you never can, so they become a disappointment.
I still have 3 different LCD glasses;
* iTheater – 320×240, lightweight bright, long battery life, not very good optics (dark diagonal corners syndrome), the +v line in the wire broke and haven’t bothered to try and repair it yet
* i-visor DH-4400VPD – old, 800×600 resolution, can do full 3D by interlacing or through dual VGA or composite video inputs, ok optics but the LCD screens are B/W and colour is achieved through a flashing RGB LED behind the screens meaning they flicker, not very comfortable to wear
* Sony Glasstron PLM-S700E – despite being many years old these LCD glasses are simply superb, Sony went to town when they created these, comfortable to wear, excellent optics onto a 832×624 resolution (native unscaled 800×600 PC input or 1024×768 that scales down to 832×624), the only drawback I found with them is the lead between glasses+controller is too short and the controller is noisy because of the fan inside (it consumes about as much power as a PS2). They’re amazing for playing driving games on.
I have also owned some Olympus FMD-200 glasses and whilst they’re old and low resolution and the image isn’t 100% scaled properly, they’re very comfortable and the optics are superb (one day I’ll get another pair), as well as some Rimax Virtual Vision 4.0 glasses that despite 640×480 resolution they were uncomfortable to wear and had atrocious optics, uneven brightness resulting in the diagonal corners of the image being dark.
Posted at 2:43 pm on Jun 21st, 2008 by Haku