3D filmmaking now hits the home market. Sony has developed a duel lensed home camcorder so your family can partake in the joy of Stereography from the comfort of where ever you are and at the price of $2199.
There has been a trickle of 3D movies, many of which make poor use of the medium and are hardly worth the hassle of putting on a pair of the heavy, active shutter glasses required by most 3D TVs. Some games have offered 3D play, also with mixed results.
If you are tired of waiting for a wash of 3D titles, there’s the option of rolling your own with a 3D movie camcorder such as the Sony HDR-TD10E.
This is one big unit if you are used to the typically light and wieldy flash-memory-based camcorders on the market these days.
To get a full 1080p resolution 3D picture, the Sony crams most of the internals of two cameras, side by side, into one housing.
There are two lenses and two CMOS sensors which forge a stereo 3D picture at 1920 by 1080 pixels and also explain why the $2199 HDR-TD10E costs about twice as much as a normal prosumer camcorder.
Besides the price tag, the other downside of the double lens system is weight. The 725g mass of the Sony will take you back in time to when video cameras required a strong wrist to hold one-handed. The gadget is also quite wide at 86.5mm.
The upside of the gadget’s physical dimensions is there’s plenty of room to ship a large LCD viewfinder. The 8.8cm touch screen viewfinder on the Sony is also a glasses-free 3D screen.
At first, it’s quite a shock to see your potential footage poking out of the screen but the 3D LCD is no gimmick.
It’s almost essential for making sure 3D effects come off properly, especially those shot close to the camera such as where you want someone’s fist or foot to come flying out of the TV screen.
I spent some time trying to get a shot of my daughter doing a dance move that leapt out of the screen in 3D. If the angle was wrong, instead of flashing out through the screen, the image would fizzle as her arm dropped under the top or bottom edge of the screen.
The viewfinder can be switched to a 2D mode (the camera can also shoot in regular 2D), which is just as well because the 3D view can get annoying over time, especially as your eyes and brain readjust to the 3D illusion every time you look back at the LCD screen.
Also, viewing in 3D is not all that necessary when shooting at a distance where the 3D wizardry just gives an illusion of depth, rather than an in-your-face effect.
Zooming (up to 10X optical in 3D and 17X in 2D) also has a bearing on the apparent depth of a 3D image and there’s a dial at the front of the camera to adjust the depth of an image manually.
Source: Australian IT
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