Thomas J. Norton

Panasonic demonstrated 3DTV from a DirecTV feed, presumably using the using the side-by-side 3D technique. But while the images would likely satisfy the uncritical viewer, the pictures lacked that last spark of detail. The side-by-side technique discards 50% of the horizontal resolution, resulting in 960 x 1080 images.

This isn't even the main show floor. It's just the midday activity in the Las Vegas Convention Center's grand entryway.

Here's a way to encourage your kids to write on the wall—that is if the wall is an LG Touch TV which functions like a huge, modern-day, multi-colored Etch-A-Sketch. It's also a 2D plasma HDTV. But it's clear that not all of us are Rembrandt.

A trip back to the Toshiba booth will be needed to get a look at Toshiba's demo of glasses free (autostereoscopic) 3D. The crowds waiting to see this technology were huge. Still, I think all the hoopla about 3D without glasses is going to leave a lot of people disappointed. I suspect that it will either be years away (if it's ever perfected at all—not all technical challenges have a ready solution) or a serious step backwards in image quality—whether from Toshiba or anyone else. But I could be surprised. A similar demo from Sony, while hardly flawless, looked better than I expected.