There is one final thing to know about how 3D televisions operate. It probably won’t matter much to you or influence your purchase but if you’re an avid television watcher you might notice a difference.
3D Blu-rays will appear slightly fuller and richer than what is broadcast over airwaves. The reason is that a 3D Blu-ray will contain images for each eye on it. Broadcast TV operates slightly differently. Because there is only so much information than can go over the airwaves, broadcast tv cuts its image in half. Each image is displayed twice as long as it would be on a Blu-ray.
Odds are that you’ll never notice the difference because broadcast TV still displays 24 frames per second, per eye. While there is a slight drop in quality this allows content providers such as DirecTV to provide 3D content with a simple software upgrade. You don’t need a new receiver in order to watch 3D programming. As a matter of fact, if you have an HD receiver from DirecTV, it should have already been upgraded. All that awaits is for you to hook up a 3D TV to it.
