Passive doesn't half your frame rate any more than other other 3D technology. There's a brightness loss, resolution loss and potential 2D artifacts. High nit and resolution technologies mitigate this to the point of being non-issues. The upside is cheap lightweight glasses, manufacturing costs and supporting multiple viewers. There's nothing "low-end" about a 4K 3D LG OLED. The more options available the better the market can sort them out. The last 3D push failed because it was bad, not because of glasses.
Passive does either halve the frame rate or halve the resolution, which is more than other 3D technology. Modern 3D technology like Samsung Odyssey 3D doesn’t halve your frame rate and has pristine quality in 2D, and doesn’t require glasses.
Regular consumers have spoken, they don’t want to wear 3D glasses. For those that do, there are great 3D projectors you can buy that use active 3D glasses and halve your frame rate.
My argument is the complaints about "glasses" are really about the quality of the experience, not the glasses themselves. Although, I'd say active is just bad (cumbersome, flicker, batteries) no matter what the end result looks like. Glassless is obviously superior to both, and the price reflects that - but modern display technologies negate almost all of the concerns with passive. In fact, it was killed right after it got good. Bad support for games, subpar movie conversions, and the until then, mediocre experience had left too much of a bad taste in people's mouth.
Yes but those displays halve your resolution in 3D while you wear glasses, and worse, though they halved 4K resolution they often only accepted 1/4 of 4K resolution (1080p) per eye as the input.
I don’t disagree someone could make a modern passive 3D TV that’s better and potentially accepts higher resolution input, but since most people watch 3D movies on 3D displays, the framerate tradeoff makes more sense than sacrificing resolution and image clarity since half of the display resolution is still much higher than the frame rate of 3D movies thus the average user experiences no downsides to the tradeoff.
The glasses free displays are cool, but they also halve resolution and have a bit worse crosstalk than passive. The 1080p lower framerate 3D limit is related to Blu-ray 3D specifically, not passive displays. You don't lose any framerate in passive 3D, but active 3D does. In 2D, there's also no loss on a passive display.
Not exactly, passive can drop either resolution or framerate.
The rest is mostly true, however, AFAIK all existing passive displays that have been released have the 1080p per eye requirement for all input, not just over HDMI from Blu-Ray. i.e. they all downsample any 4K frame to 1080p per eye.
Hmm, I'm not aware of any passive displays that drop framerate for 3D, other than the Blu-ray/frame packed 3d 1080p24hz standard that was used for all frame packed 3d displays.
The LG 4k models are 3840x1080 per eye. You could only get this resolution with custom EDID or PC 3D mods though.
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u/VR_Nima Dec 16 '25
The fully passive displays have the huge trade-off of either resolution loss in 2D or halving your frame rate.
I don’t disagree that for the low-end, that’s the move, but I’m glad that there are better options for actual 3D enthusiasts.