Sharp has been showing off an 85-inch 8K TV for years, and now the company is taking absurdly high-resolution to an ambitious new level with a prototype of an 85-inch 8K TV with Dolby glasses free 3D. That’s a lot of unproven tech in one concept.
So let’s be straight up: The glasses-free 3D on this massive TV just doesn’t work very well. The TV was cycling through scenes from The Life of Pi and Frozen. The difficulty with any 3D is viewing angles: As you go from a dead center viewing perspective to a wider and wider angle it looks worse and worse. I would argue that Sharp’s prototype barely has a viewing angle. The 3D effect barely works. It just kind of looks like the TV is broken.
Glasses free 3D at regular 1080p resolution has only gotten reasonably good in recent years. It shouldn’t be surprising that it doesn’t work well. Dolby only started showing off its 3D encoding tech relatively recently, and 8K resolution isn’t even a thing. You cannot shoot anything in 8K. It’s not even really clear that 8K will ever be a useful product for regular people. Ditto for glasses-free 3D.
But I really appreciate that Sharp is investing itself in really crazy future tech. Even if they never nail this one, maybe they’ll learn how to take the regular tech from usable to awesome.