Long story short, I'm shopping for a 3D computer monitor. None of the local retailers sell them, so I can't just go in and examine them personally to decide which one best suits what I'm looking for. I've narrowed it down pretty far, to LCD IPS displays using passive interleaved 3D. But I'm still not just going to order one sight-unseen without arming myself with some knowledge. This is how I shop for tech.
So, I turn to the experts.. the internet. The internet knows all, right?
It takes all of about four seconds at Google to find a review. The headline is not promising: "3D Fail". So I read the review, and it all looks good, up until the 3D part, where they describe poor depth rendering, and very bad ghosting (where your eyes are seeing parts of the image intended for the other eye).
Let's break these two gripes down, starting with the depth. I'm a visual effects artist, and I've created 3D renders before. The "depth" of an image, meaning the perceived distance between objects in the scene, is controlled by separation. The further apart the left and right images are from each other, the "further" the image will appear to be from the plane of the screen. This goes both ways, depending on how it's set up. It could be closer, or further away. But the result is the same: The depth is directly controlled by how the image is being rendered in the graphics card, and how far apart it's placing those parts of the image.
In other words, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the monitor itself.
The monitor is merely displaying what it's being told to display by the computer that it's connected to. That's why software such as NVidia's 3D Vision includes real time adjustments for things like convergence and depth. You push a button on your keyboard, and the scene depth changes. That doesn't have squat to do with the display.
So why did the reviewer bring it up at all? It's simple, really. He didn't know any better. He hooked it up, and he saw what he saw, but he didn't understand what was happening behind the scenes in software to make that 3D image possible, or how to correctly change it, instead just flailing away on various buttons and controls and saying that it didn't work.
Secondly, he complains about ghosting. Since I've read up on passive 3D displays, I know very well what the leading cause of this is: Poor configuration. Ghosting on passive displays is caused by slight color bleeding, where a color will bleed over into the surrounding pixels. It's more commonly used (intentionally) as antialiasing, to reduce the "jaggies" present on the raw output. 3D software can work around this, if it's configured correctly, and prevent those specific colors from bleeding vertically, which is what causes parts of the image to appear in the other eye's field of view.
Aside from not adjusting any configuration settings in either the monitor or the software, the reviewer also made one other grievous error, which I was only recently pointed to by another user who read the same review: The reviewer connected the monitor to the PC using DVI. The instructions included with the monitor clearly state that 3D only functions properly over the HDMI connection.
So the leading cause of his complaint was actually caused by his own dumbassedness: He hooked it up wrong.
So, the leading "expert" on monitor technology can't even plug the thing in correctly, and then complains loudly about how poor the performance is.
Then comes the worst part of this whole mess: No one else in the English speaking world actually reviews the thing for themselves. Do a Google search for "Asus 3D IPS monitor review" (I won't even bother listing the model number, you'll find it). The first thing you'll find is the CNET review that I'm talking about above. The next two hundred responses will be from other tech websites, all of them doing nothing but retweeting the CNET review.
Seriously.. of all the tech-related websites in the world, only one of them actually laid eyes on the hardware in question, and everyone else just took their word for it. Not a one of them stopped for two seconds to think "Hey, this doesn't sound right..." Again, the reason is simple: They don't know any better, either. They don't understand the technology any more than CNET did, and they have no way of knowing that the reviewer might have made a mistake or two. Or five.
I'm honestly surprised that Asus hasn't filed a lawsuit against CNET over this. That one review has probably single-handedly killed this product for them, because there are no other reviews that state anything other than what CNET did. Every review that anyone reads will be negative in the extreme, and no one will buy the thing.
Another user did point me to a review of the monitor from Romania, who actually hooked it up correctly, and had no real complaints to speak of. But how many of their customers are going to see this review? Not many, I'd wager. Newegg's review section is barren because no one wants to buy the thing.
These are the so-called "experts" that we turn to for help in making purchase decisions. Seemingly unknown to the reviewers themselves, this is actually a pretty big responsibility. I can't see it for myself, so I need someone else to tell me as much as they can about it. But I believe I'm entitled to listen to someone who actually knows what the hell they're doing. I might as well listen to Jim-Bob Jones down the street if this is the kind of crap I'm going to be reading on these websites.
If you can't even plug the thing in correctly, you have no business being an "expert", or posting any kind of review online, especially one that's going to be proliferated across the entire internet. Your ignorance of the very technology you claim to be an "expert" on is not doing any favors for the companies that make these products. I'm half-tempted to buy this monitor just to spite the reviewer.
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