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5 Negative Aspects About 3D

I’ve decided I’m a 3D optimist. Ultimately, I think the format is going to improve in the hands of skilled filmmakers and technicians with able hands and keen eyes and will be as much an institution of the moving image as color is today. If the type of people who currently say 3D is a gimmick won the argument back in the day when color film was becoming popular, we’d be watching G.I. Joe in black and white. It seems inevitable that the technology has such tremendous potential that to abandon it because of a few—ok, quite a number of hiccups would be totally shortsighted.

[h2]2) It can make the image appear dimmer[/h2]

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This is another point that the anti-3D crowd brings up all the time. It’s not without merit. Most of the movies that get shown in 3D have a specific color palette that is designed to meld with the 3D effect, in which the fine lines on the glasses restrict the amount of light that can reach the eyes. As a result they project the movie with greater brightness, but this doesn’t keep us from feeling like we’re being robbed of some image quality when we compare the dimness of the image we’re seeing versus what’s actually placed on the screen.

Of course, this again brings us back to the glasses. They’re designed so that our two eyes see different images to create the 3D effect, but as it stands right now, the design of the glasses also blocks a lot of light. Or at least enough for it to be noticeable. You remove the glasses from the equation, and you can watch the movie as you perceive it to be projected and don’t get the feeling like you’re missing anything. I’m not convinced that the objective experience of the image as we see it is any different in terms of dimness in the two formats, but this is a criticism that people aren’t going to let go of until there’s a fix.

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