Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
Two dimensions of 3D
An old Saturday Night Live segment once included this joke when Frank Sinatra was still alive:
“‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ is back in town, and sources report nobody’s interested and nobody cares.”
That line came back to me after Sony, once Japan’s “Big Blue”, announced Thursday its vision of an $11-billion 3D market by early 2013, with three-dimensional PlayStation 3s, TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, cameras, live broadcasting and — the historic staple — movies and theatres.
Photo credit: REUTERS/Rick Wilking
I attended Sony’s briefing that included a 2D video of its 3D world, plans for 3,000 projector installations by end-2010, a single-lens High-Frame-Rate movie camera (when previously it took two cameras to make three dimensions), and an end-to-end solution still involving glasses.
Blu-ray rental shelves still look bare
Some of my friends have bought Blu-ray disc players recently and brag about the breath-taking picture quality on their big flat TVs. Sales of Blu-ray recorders have outstripped those of regular DVD recorders by almost seven to three in recent months in Japan, research firm GfK Marketing Services Japan says.
But some Blu-ray users complain that movie rental stores don’t have much of a selection in the format. Tsutaya, Japan’s largest movie rental chain and a unit of Culture Convenience Club, says some of its stores carry as many as 300 Blu-ray titles, but that’s barely a fraction of the average 40,000 DVD titles available.
