Peter Smith takes a look at the recent DisplaySearch report on 3D Televisions and writes up this great little nugget for ITworld. In short, they aren’t selling very well.
But the stats are even worse than I thought they’d be. DisplaySearch estimates that 3.2 million 3D TVs will be shipped in 2010 . Note that’s shipped, not sold. 3.2 million equates to 2% of all flat panel displays shipped (as far as I can ascertain, that’s worldwide shipments). So yeah, there are not many 3D TVs being shipped this year.
But wait, that’s not the end of the bad news. In Western Europe (the only region where they offered this data point) sales of 3D glasses are less than 1 per 3D set sold. In other words, a lot of Western Europeans who buy a TV with 3D capability don’t even bother to buy the glasses to use that feature. Presumably they’re either waiting for better glasses prices, more content, or the TV they picked just happened to have 3D capability but it wasn’t a feature they were really interested in.
That second point is the really big one. People buy a 3D TV just because it’s a good 2D TV as well, with no intention of ever really using the 3D Feature. That’s a combination of
- They don’t care
- There’s no 3D Content (or at least not enough)
- Manufacturers are pushing 3D TV’s so hard that plain 2D TV’s are starting to become hard to get. All the nice features go into the 3D TV’s.
Things like 120Hz or 240Hz displays are billed as 3D Televisions, but in reality they make great 2D televisions as well. The fact that so many people just bought new TV’s to fit into the HDTV bracket probably doesn’t help things either.
No doubt, these percentages will grow as the cost of adding 3D Capability to TV’s falls so more and more TV’s just have 3D as an extra feature like closed captioning or Picture-In-Picture.
