I bought one of these cheap, glasses-free 3D media players

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Linuxluver

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#92711 4-Nov-2011 11:28

I ordered a "3D Stereoscopic 8 Inch HD Photo Frame and Video Player (Glasses-Free 3D)" (a real mouthful!) from Chinavasion on Saturday and it arrived yesterday (Thursday).

It works really well for the NZ$170+ shipping ($38) I paid for it.

Deep breath: It worked out of the box. That part was good. :-)

It can play 3D stills from both my Fuji Real 3D W3 perfectly and - sort of - my LG Optimus 3D cameras.
It distorts the 4:3 images from the LG and presents them as 16:9. But the 3D effect is there. The LG doesn't do 16:9 for still in the current firmware.

It can play 3D video perfectly from the LG Optimus 3D and also from Magix Movie Edit Pro MX Plus

It can't (correctly) play the 3D AVI files from the Fuji camera. If I put it in 3D mode, it messes up the alignment completely and the result is correct sound, shame about the messy video.

But if I process the Fuji 3D video fiels through Magix Movie Edit Pro MX Plus into side-by-side squeezed 3D mp4 files, it will happily play them. I haven't tried any other formats as output. This is the optimal format for YouTube and I'm happy to re-use those files on this device. It only takes a handful of minutes on my PC to convert even a large video, so not really a problem.

If an image or video isn't recognised as 3D by default, then you just long-press the Return button and it puts the device into 3D mode manually. It works.

Note: It plays these same original Fuji 3D files just fine as 2D video by default. It seems to be able to play pretty much any kind of 2D video....including *.mkv files so that's a plus right there.

The display does a good job of 3D - both depth and colour - provided you have it at just the right angle up / down and left / right.

The device supports USB thumb drives, self-powered external USB hard drives (no size limit specified) and SDHC flash chips up to 32GB....so pretty much anything. You connect it your PC and copy files onto it....or use a card reader and copy them onto the chip...then insert in the device. Whatever.

For what I paid, it's good enough. I'm loving the big 8" screen.

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ZollyMonsta

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#541099 4-Nov-2011 11:52

How can the 3D effect be seen, without glasses? Is it a 3D effect when you move your head left to right rather than remaining still wearing glasses and seeing the 3D effect?

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bazzer

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#541109 4-Nov-2011 12:21

ZollyMonsta: How can the 3D effect be seen, without glasses? Is it a 3D effect when you move your head left to right rather than remaining still wearing glasses and seeing the 3D effect?

Presumably it using either parallax barrier (like the Nintendo 3DS) or lenticular lens?

Linuxluver

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#541129 4-Nov-2011 13:21

bazzer:
ZollyMonsta: How can the 3D effect be seen, without glasses? Is it a 3D effect when you move your head left to right rather than remaining still wearing glasses and seeing the 3D effect?

Presumably it using either parallax barrier (like the Nintendo 3DS) or lenticular lens?

I'll provisionally assume it's parallax barrier as the blurb on the web site says "like the Nintendo 3DS".

You don't have to move your head. You can just sit there and watch it without glasses. A lot depends on the quality of the 3D. I have in the past 2 weeks been 're-mastering' my 3D videos to optimise the parallax with respect to the centre of interest. This makes the videos much easier to watch and reduces or removes the headache factor.

I may end up doing two versions because parallax optimisation is a little bit different for glasses-free displays (your eyes sort out the parallax because they can) versus 'locked-in' parallax in modes like anaglyph where the parallax is embedded in the image itself from a fixed point of view and not left to the human eye to manually sort out.

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