Panasonic demands 1080p 3D TV 'standard'

CES Panasonic wants the consumer electronics industry to come together and join it in the development of a standard for full HD 3D TV.

Even if its call falls of deaf ears, the Japanese giant will start selling tellies capable of displaying a 3D image at 1080p resolution in 2010, it said today, along with a Blu-ray Disc player capable of holding 1080p 3D content.

"Displaying 3D shouldn't limit picture performance," Panasonic USA big cheese Bob Perry said at CES, and claimed that most current 3D HD TV systems drop the resolution right back.

Not so the system Perry hailed as the "world's first 3D Full HD plasma home theatre system" - a 103in 1080p HD TV capable of rapidly alternating between left eye- and right eye-specific images fed to it from a custom Blu-ray player.

However, Panasonic admitted that the system requires "a special pair of active shutter glasses that work in synchronisation with the Plasma HDTV".

Panasonic's tech got a thumbs up from Terminator creator James Cameron, who's been using it to work on his long awaited sci-fi movie Avatar, a project first rumoured to be in development in the mid-1990s before Cameron put it on hold while he worked on Titanic.

Cameron's had a chance to play with the 103in 3D HD TV, which is more than most folk will get. The sets Panasonic has in mind to bring to market in 2010 will be of rather more modest dimensions, we suspect.