Even the digital switch last year didn't "force" HD on consumers, if we want to get picky about that. I'm not worried about having 3D forced on me. The catch is that the industry as a whole has done such a poor job of consumer education and such a good job of confusion that we are going to see a lot more confused consumers out there because a handful of large corporations are trying to make a big deal about 3D over the next year or two. I suspect that cost will keep most people from being too caught up in it - the lack of discussion of prices at CES suggests that this won't come cheap - but it is the same sort of marketing mayhem that we've seen from HDMI over the last five years (and I think we all know how highly I approve of their long-term planning... ).

If 3D is an important feature then I agree it is prudent to wait for the bugs to be fixed. However, the other driving factor is 3D content. The technology could be fine but if there are only a handful of good 3D movies it makes the purchase of the necessary gear less desirable. By "good" I'm referring to plot, character development, story line etc and the appropriate use of 3D. As an example of inappropriate use of technology I point to certain SACD or DVD-A discs. I've got examples that really use the surround speakers yielding an unnatural distracting experience. So, IMO 3D technology and 3D content must mature before we will see any significant level of adoption.

You KNOW George Lucas is going to pay ILM to invent the software to remake all 6 Star Wars movies in 3D. How could he resist?

Will that be enough 3D content for you?

I think that is one of the issues here. With BluRay, you could take the old source material and convert it to 1080p and you've got a library that's pretty robust. I just can't imagine how you're going to take old movies and turn them into 3D in a way that would actually look decent. So is anyone going to buy a 3D TV so they can watch the very few movies that have actually been shot in 3D? Now the other factor that may influence here is not the movie crowd but the gaming people. Sony is already talking about producing 3D games. I believe MW2 has grossed more than any movie ever, so that is a pretty huge market. As for me? If it is main stream when my TV dies, I'd take a look. But I wouldn't be in any hurry to go out and buy one. How many people would is the question.

Maybe older movies could be made to look 3D, I don't know. But if they could it wouldn't be enough for me to pay a premium for 3D equipment and repurchase my movie collection in that format. I have been very selective about which of my existing DVD movies I buy in BluRay. They have to be ones I watch fairly often because I enjoy the story and they have good cinematography. As I noted earlier I don't think 3D implementation, even if is judged desirable by the general public, will leapfrog BluRay and BluRay has a long way to go to overtake DVD! There is time to figure out if 3D will move from being a gimmick to mainstream acceptance.

So, I'm not going to hold my breath while waiting for Star Wars to possibly be reconfigured to 3D in hopes of jump starting the 3D format. Gee, they've not been released in BluRay yet!

Recently I was in a Magnolia (a "high-end" chain affliated with Best-Buy), and noticed that a number of the DVD's that they were showing seemed to have a artifical 3D type effect when shown on LCDs. It was particularly noticable on a the most recent version of King Kong. The sales guy claimed it was an artifact of the upconverting DVD player. I was almost wondering if there is some slight of hand going on to make 3D more acceptable? Has anyone else seen the effect I noticed?

It could be motion artifacts you're seeing, or it could be how the TV's are set up (contrast, color, sharpness at MAX in the showroom.) One thing I noticed with LCD's when I was shopping for a new HD tv last year was no matter what the refresh rate the set had the motion artifacts were still present. I'd also read the comment that some movies with real actors looked like it was a cartoon movie on LCD. I did notice that effect in the showrooms (that's why I bought a plasma.)

I should have been clearer on one point. The 3D effect was a receding effect rather then the overblown effect seen in a lot of movies where the object comes towards you.

I believe it is as feasible to 3Dize a 2D movie as it is to colorize a black and white movie. If you remember when the first movie colorizations were done, they looked terrible. It was very expensive to do it by hand coloring each frame manually and humans did a poor job. But many of the more modern colorized versions actually look really good, often indistinguishable from a native color movie. Computers have made it relatively cheap and easy to colorize a movie with high quality results. The human identifies the color of various objects and the computer follows them across frames and helps minimize the amount of work.

The same kind of software would be needed to create a 3D movie from a 2D original. The humans have to queue the system by telling it which objects are at what depths and the computer can follow objects frame-to-frame and generate the calculated left/right views. It won't be as good as a originally 3D filmed movie because there won't be as much variation in depth of different objects. But I suspect it would be 90% as effective. A viewer would have to look closely to notice, for example, that all the objects sitting on a desk are in the same plane as the desk while the person standing in front of it is in another plane.

Generating a 3D version of a 2D movie will still be much more expensive than creating a blu-ray from an existing film which really just involves some touch up of the film and then rescanning with a high rez scanner. Unless the film is badly damaged (faded, scratched, etc) in which case making a good blu-ray release can be a major undertaking.

I think I have seen the same type of effect that 73Bruin saw. I was in Best Buy, seeing if they had any good deals on movies on blu ray. A TV and blu ray player were set up nearby, to demonstrate the picture quality of HDTV and blu ray. The TV was an LCD, between 32 and 37 inches. Batman Begins was playing. I saw the scene where Batman is trying to save Rachel after she is drugged. The police are chasing them. The Batmobile, police cars, and helicopter had very distinct edges. It was sort of like a 3D look. This was more than a year ago, so I don't think there was any slight-of-hand involved.