Currently people think of buying a 3D TV as a choice–that is, you can buy a standard 2D TV, or you can spend a bit more and buy a 3D TV. When faced with that choice, most people aren’t going to shell out for 3D because it isn’t worth the investment to them, which makes it easy to think that 3D TVs have completely bombed in the market and will never be widely adopted.
Here’s the trick, though: It doesn’t matter whether you buy a 3D TV right now or not. The TV manufacturers know that if they’re going to stay in business, they’ll need to convince you to buy a new TV in the next few years, so they start out by selling high-end 3D TVs. They know that most people won’t buy them, just as most people didn’t buy HDTVs for the first few years. What they’re doing is establishing that 3D is a premium TV feature that should cost more than a non-3D TV. Naturally, the extra money they’ll make from the early adopters is nice, but what’s more important to them is the mental association between “3D” and “a high-end television.”
Over the next few years, the TV makers will roll 3D into HDTV models at increasingly lower price points. And more consumers will buy them, thinking, “Well, I haven’t bought a new TV in a while, and I can get such a good deal on a 3D TV right now.” Meanwhile, 3D video will continue to proliferate, increasing the chances that you’ll get hooked on a certain 3D-only show or channel.
We’re already seeing that process at work. Even though most people generally think of 3D TV as a premium product, the fact is that during the 2010 holiday season you could pick up a cheap 50-inch plasma set for under $1000–sometimes even as low as $700. Right now, you can buy a passive-3D 47-inch LCD model from Vizio for under $900, hardly a premium price by any stretch of the imagination.
Of course, once you have a 3D TV, you’ll want the one with better glasses, or a deeper 3D effect, and so on–that is to say, the TV manufacturers will have a whole bunch of incremental improvements to develop year by year just as they’re currently doing. And that will keep you buying new TVs until they run out of small ways to improve those, and then they’ll move on to the next big HDTV shift (which probably will be 4K-resolution HDTVs), and the TV Circle of Life will start once again.
So really, it doesn’t matter what you think about 3D TVs. Love them or hate them, you will be watching 3D videos on your TV, taking 3D photos with your camera, playing 3D games on your new Xbox, and preserving your family moments with a pocket 3D camcorder within the next five years.
Check out the full story here…
News Source: Yahoo!
