Hands-on With Vizio's New Theater 3D HDTVs

Vizio's new polarized Theater 3D showed up on the CES Unveiled show floor. We got to play with it.

On Monday, Vizio announced their new Theater 3D HDTV lineup: Every TV in their E-series, M-series, and XVT-series line will include support for 3D TV. However, instead of using the active-shutter glasses that were so prevalent (and expensive) in 2010's 3D TVs, Vizio worked with a manufacturer called Sensio to implement polarized 3D--the same kind of 3D found in most movie theaters.

While polarized 3D TVs could potentially be cheaper than active-shutter 3D TVs, and the glasses are lighter, more comfortable, and cheaper, we wanted to try it out for ourselves. Video after the jump.

Of course, 2D video can't quite capture the grandeur of a 3D TV, so I made sure to try it out myself. While watching through Sensio's demo reel, I was struck more by what it lacked than what it had: specifically, it lacked that annoying flicker characteristic of active-shutter glasses, and the glasses themselves were much lighter (not to mention more stylish).

While they didn't have an active-shutter set available for me to do a side-by-side test, Vizio's new Theater 3D TVs are promising indeed. The actual "3D-ness" of the image was just as good as what I'd expect from an active-shutter 3D TV, and the image quality didn't seem significantly hampered by the dimmed glasses. Now we'll just need to see how Vizio's TVs stack up against LG's recently-announced LW6500 polarized 3D TV.

Check out PCWorld's complete coverage of CES 2011.

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