So much so that for possibly the first time in our many years working in the AV world, we honestly have our doubts that this technology will be cracked. At least in any satisfactory way.

To be fair, most of the brands who’ve dared to show their glasses-free 3D efforts to date have been quick to declare that it will be 5-10 years before the technology is ready to come to market. Only Toshiba – in a move which frankly looks more foolhardy than brave right now – has actually gone ahead and launched a glasses-free 3D TV. And from what we’ve seen of this TV (full review soon), its glasses-free 3D tech isn’t really up to scratch if you want your 3D viewing to actually have much quality to it.

Toshiba's 55ZL2 is the first glasses-free 3D TV to market in Europe

What’s troubling is just how numerous and extreme the problems are with glasses-free 3D technology at the moment. For a start, many of the sets we’ve seen have really lacked the sense of depth you generally see with normal glasses-on 3D TVs.

Glasses-free 3D has also lacked clarity and resolution, partly due to the available screen resolution having to be shared between different viewpoints and the core separate left and right eye outputs, and partly due to some consistent problems with motion blur.

Then there’s the small matter of the glasses-free ‘sweetspot’. For if you’re not sat in the right place – or one of a set number of ‘right places’ – the picture becomes an unwatchable mess of ghosting, with no 3D effect at all. And even if you ARE sat in a designated sweet spot, if you happen to move your head position more than a few inches, you have your viewing disrupted by an obvious and unsightly seam in the picture, accompanied by lots of ghosting and blurring.

Toshiba has actually had a pretty game stab at getting round the sweetspot situation with the 55ZL2, using a clever combination of an in-built camera and heavy-duty processing to support nine different viewing ‘perspectives’ from up to five different viewing positions in your room. But still the results are far from perfect unless you keep your head very still.

Most troubling of all, though, is the fact that on all the glasses-free 3D TVs we’ve seen so far including the finished 55ZL2, the physical structure of the various filters that have to be placed over the screen have all been blatantly visible in the 3D picture. This ‘visible lens structure’ usually takes the form of either horizontal lines or wavy line interference. And yes, it is every bit as distracting as it sounds.

If you look hard enough, there are signs of hope for glasses-free 3D technology. Every brand around is positive that it will happen eventually. The sort of face-tracking technology used on the 55ZL2 has the potential to at least reduce the ‘sweet spot’ problem. And there’s no doubt that the finished 55ZL2 from what we’ve seen so far has improved considerably from the version we saw just at the CES in January.

But the fact remains that never before in all our years of writing about AV have we seen manufacturers showing the press and public a new TV technology that’s looked anywhere near as unimpressive – or at least, unready – as glasses-free 3D. This makes us wonder how much better the big AV brands think glasses-free 3D is actually going to get if they believe what they’ve already got is good enough to show.

The main thing we’re struggling to see past, though, is that for glasses-free 3D to work – using current approaches, at any rate – something has to be physically placed across the front of the screen. And wherever this happens, as we’ve already seen to a lesser degree with the polarizing filters used on big passive 3D screens, there’s enormous potential for the structure of the thing on the screen to stand between you and your immersion in what you’re watching.

So while we’ll be more than happy to be proved wrong at some (probably distant) point down the line, right now we’re left feeling that just because so many punters want glasses-free 3D doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in any affordable or really enjoyable way.

We realise this is potentially an unpopular, even controversial thing to be saying. After all, right now you’ve got the Murdochs caught up in the News of the World phone hacking scandal, and all sorts of pathetic mud-slinging going on in Parliament as various politicians try to accuse other politicians of somehow being involved in conspiracy theories about the now seemingly scuppered bid by the Murdoch’s News International group to take full control of Sky.

In fact, it suddenly seems to be open season on Sky, with the latest attack coming from the Competition Commission. As reported in our story last week, the CC has announced that it isn’t happy with Sky’s level of control of the pay-TV movie market in the UK. So much so that it seems almost certain that the Commission will take some kind of action this week to bust Sky’s balls about it.

Sky's groundbreaking HD receiver. Which also does 3D, of course.

So far as we’re concerned, though, Sky has not only done nothing wrong at all, but is actually a force for AV good that should be lauded for its achievements rather than battered for them.

Furthermore, the CC’s findings seem to be based on spurious if not actually erroneous grounds. For instance, the CC implies that there aren’t enough different options for watching pay-TV movies aside from Sky, when in fact you can now stream HD movies from an Xbox, a PS3, Smart TVs, BT Internet, Virgin, iTunes and more… Basically, it’s as if the CC has never heard of the Internet, and doesn’t have any idea how much the Web is infiltrating and affecting the use of everyday household video devices.

Also, while Sky is undoubtedly a powerful negotiator when trying to secure pay TV movie rights with the Hollywood studios, this is surely just a sign of how effectively it does its job – and the attractiveness of the ‘package’ in terms of quality as well as money that Sky can pitch to the studios. In other words, kicking Sky for its market dominance seems a classically British case of punishing someone for being too successful.

Easily the most unfair part of the CC’s preliminary findings about Sky’s influence in the pay-TV movie market, though, relates to its comment that Sky’s dominance has stifled innovation. As AV enthusiasts and journalists who’ve been working at the coalface of home entertainment technology for 15 years, this statement just seems extraordinary.

So far as general, life-changing AV technology is concerned, Sky pretty much invented the hard disk recorder category with its Sky+ system. Then it revolutionised TV guides with its first proper electronic programme guide.

Much more importantly for AV/home cinema enthusiasts, though, it pioneered the introduction of Dolby Digital 5.1 audio for film and sport broadcasts, with profound implications for our home cinema speaker systems.

Next, Sky single-handedly made Britain the HD capital of Europe, launching a range of HD channels and content far earlier than any other platform, and unquestionably hurrying along the arrival of HD broadcasts from the UK’s other broadcasters.

If you’ve got Sky there’s now so much HD content on it that you should be able to spend pretty much all of your viewing time in HD. And even if you don’t have Sky we strongly believe that the amount of HD available from the likes of ITV and the BBC would be nowhere near as high at this stage if the adoption and awareness of HD hadn’t been propelled by Sky.

Most recently, of course, we’ve seen Sky introduce 3D to the UK miles ahead of any other broadcasters, offering many hours of varied 3D material from day one of the channel’s launch. Also, crucially, we have first-hand experience of the amount of time and money Sky has ploughed into continually improving the quality of its home-sourced 3D material, advancing the medium on a quality front much faster than any other broadcaster.

It seems unlikely to us that the BBC would have gone for its Wimbledon 3D footage this year if Sky hadn’t already blazed the 3D trail and helped the TV world ship a solid amount of 3D-capable TVs. Also, while the Beeb’s 3D Wimbledon footage wasn’t bad, there’s no doubt that it lacked the sophistication of Sky’s latest 3D content, proving the point about how Sky’s ability to invest in R&D can advance AV quality.

To be fair, Sky DOES have inherent advantages over some of its rival broadcasters when it comes to attracting the movie studios to its platforms. Its huge subscription base is a great number to be able to put on the negotiating table, and one of the reasons it can be so aggressive about developing high-quality audio and video standards to appeal to the film studios with is the fact that it uses a satellite delivery system, where the issues of bandwidth that present so many problems to terrestrial and even Internet broadcasters are more or less redundant.

But so what? Far from being some sort of industry-damaging problem, to fans like of us of picture and sound quality and the whole home cinema experience, Sky’s infrastructure advantages have longed provided the answer to our AV prayers.

Obviously not everyone can afford a Sky subscription, especially in the current tough times. But the saying ‘if you want the best, you just have to pay for it’ doesn’t exist for nothing. It describes a basic tenet of the democratic, commercial world that most of us feel privileged to live in, and which leads to just the sort of the diversity and innovation already available in the UK TV scene today.

So personally we’d very much appreciate it if the Competition Commission would ignore the current anti-Sky political clamour and allow the UK’s most innovative broadcaster to get on unhindered with advancing the quality and technology of delivering movies to our homes. Cheers.

Our focus here is rather on the current apparent indifference to 3D being shown by the public at large.

To kick things off, ticket sale stats from the US – where AV trends almost always start – suggest that far more people, around 60%, chose to watch the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 2D than 3D. This reverses the ticket sales experience seen with other recent blockbuster 3D films, and as such immediately raises the question of whether people have already started to tire of 3D.

Even Captain Jack couldn't manage to make people excited about 3D.

Then there’s the relatively quiet uptake of 3D TVs so far. Things have picked up a little recently after a pretty disastrous 2010, but sales are still sufficiently low to have spokespeople for some of the TV brands casting around for things to blame – the recession, for instance, or Hollywood for turning out too many poorly made 3D films.

The one thing you never hear from any of the AV brands, of course, is any suggestion that maybe, just maybe the mass market aren’t buying 3D TVs because they don’t actually want 3D in their homes.

Then there’s the negativity that seems to surround 3D when it’s discussed by ‘normal people’ and even many people involved heavily in the world of film and media. Francis Ford Coppola has described watching 3D films with glasses on as ‘tiresome’ and like something from the 1950s. The BBC’s technology correspondent was brazenly unconvinced abut 3D during a little preview he did ahead of the BBC’s Wimbledon 3D broadcasts. ‘Legendary’ (or ‘slightly annoying’, depending on your point of view) film critic Roger Ebert notoriously hates 3D. Equally legendary (and not annoying at all) film editor Walter Murch has written at length about why he considers 3D a flawed format. And so we could go on.

3D doesn't really float Walter Murch's boat.

If we had a pound, meanwhile, for every time we’ve heard a friend/relative/tech forum user/person down the pub say there’s no way they’ll even think about getting into 3D until you don’t have to wear glasses, we’d probably be able to afford a Lumis 3D-S. Well, nearly.

The comparisons with HD in this respect are clear and alarming. Pretty much everyone with any interest in AV at all ‘got’ HD almost right away, and couldn’t wait for it to arrive. Even now the passion for HD remains strong, with many people excitedly looking forward to the day when everything they watch will finally be HD. Evangelists for 3D among normal people and media commentators are much harder to find. They’re there, certainly, but there’s a feeling at the moment that they’re struggling against the tide.

Perhaps the single most alarming piece of evidence for AV manufacturers to contemplate, though, is a recent study undertaken by DisplaySearch into the importance of new features on buying decisions. This asked more than 14,000 people across 14 countries if LED backlighting, Internet Connectivity or 3D capability was most likely to be important in their next choice of TV. And in the vast majority of countries, 3D came in not just third, but a hugely distant third.

Particularly troubling was the showing of 3D in supposedly key ‘early adopter’ territories like the UK, Germany, the US and Japan. For in all four of these place 3D scarcely registered as an important feature at all in the DisplaySearch data, soundly beaten by Internet connectivity and resoundingly thrashed by LED backlighting.

Intriguingly interest in 3D was much higher in what might be called ‘up and coming’ TV territories, such as India, Indonesia and Turkey, with Indonesian respondents actually making 3D their most sought after feature. But really it’s the established, premium markets that the 3D TV makers need to impress, and at the moment it seems they’re just not doing it.

Of course, it’s entirely possible, probable even, that 3D might become a more or less standard feature on TVs over the next couple of years, with little or no cost premium attached to it. But that’s not really the point. For the reality is that an AV industry desperate to inject some life into flagging sales and find a way to earn some margins during the seemingly endless recession was really looking to 3D as a means of persuading the mass market to replace their TVs as soon as possible. Yet most of the evidence suggests that not only is this not happening, but interest in 3D may be tailing off rather than building.

There’s still time to turn things round. Many people who actually see 3D on a TV, especially on a high quality and large screen, tend to like it. Sky remains aggressive about generating content for its 3D channel. While some directors dislike 3D, plenty of others seem to like it. It seems increasingly likely that the much-resented glasses will eventually disappear while leaving you still able to watch a decent 3D picture. And finally we guess there’s always the possibility of Hollywood turning up another Avatar to reinvigorate the 3D world – though personally we suspect the Avatar ‘moment’ is gone.

But for now, while 3D continues to dominate the AV headlines on most websites (including this one!), it’s fair to say that 3D’s battle to win hearts and minds is currently far from won.

The only thing stopping us from signing ourselves into the nearest residential care home tomorrow is the fact that the reason for our curmudgeonliness is something supposedly associated with young folk: console gaming. So maybe we’re not total fogeys just yet.

What is it about gaming that’s got our goat? Simple: the seemingly unstoppable crapification of gaming. As underlined in big fat red ink at this year’s E3 gaming show in Las Vegas.

We actually started to be concerned about the toilet-bound trajectory of gaming as soon as we first played with our Nintendo Wii. Our previous love for all things Nintendo had got us feeling almost weak at the knees as we unboxed Ninty’s latest innovative console. Especially as we’d got a lovely new Zelda game and some co-op friendly sports stuff to play on it.

After just half an hour of waving the Wiimote around like Marcel Marceau on acid, though, we knew our love affair with Nintendo was over. At least until they went back to proper gaming, rather than dumbing down not just their games but the very interface used to play them. Since that first few hours of growing horror, our Wii has only ever been used for weighing ourselves (seldom a cause for any joy whatsoever) and keeping the relatives entertained at Christmas.

Ah, so the Wii really does make you feel like you're interacting with your environment

Then there’s the whole smartphone/iPad gaming thing. Don’t get us wrong: we totally understand that portable gaming has a place, and have ourselves succumbed to playing Angry Birds to make long journeys more bearable. But at no point during any of these in-transit gaming experiences have we felt as if we were doing something we’d want to do again once we were back at home. Simply because the inevitable small screens and puny audio of portable consoles can’t get close to the intensity of experience possible when playing an HD console game on a 100in projection screen accompanied by full surround sound. Yet somehow slinging birds across a screen at a bunch of pigs has come to be considered the zenith of gaming cool.

For a while hardcore gamers were able to seek refuge from the depthless tripe creeping into the gaming world by retreating into the reassuringly serious arms of our PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles. But then the PS3’s Move and the Xbox’s Kinect accessories appeared, and our safe haven started to crumble around our ears.

It’s easy to see why Sony and Microsoft would want to try and emulate Nintendo’s motion-sensing approach to game control. After all, Nintendo’s bid to ‘make gaming accessible to all’ had seen its console sell like hotcakes. However, with no real exceptions, the games built to make extensive use of the Move and Kinect peripherals have all been much or less tripe for anyone who wasn’t a) under 14 years old or b) drunk.

Please, God, make it stop

This isn’t actually at all surprising, for it seems obvious to us that the moment you have to accommodate people jumping about or waving their arms into a gaming control environment, you’re going to have to make a game that’s painfully basic. Especially as the sort of people who prefer waving their arms about and giggling when gaming to using a joystick aren’t going to be the sort of people who want to spend much time or money on gaming. What’s more, contrary to what the console marketing people would have you believe, waving your arms and jumping about just isn’t compatible with getting immersed in an in-depth game. In fact, it has totally the opposite effect.

Honestly our expectation was that the Kinect/Move nonsense would quickly die a death as it dawned on Microsoft and Sony that the game attach rate to such casual hardware wasn’t making commercial sense. But in fact, this year’s E3 suggests that the big console names are pushing Move and Kinect harder than ever. A really terrifying amount of Microsoft’s press conference in particular was devoted to the latest round of Kinect drivel, leaving precious little time for what E3 used to be all about: getting us excited about the ‘proper’ games coming out over the next 12 months.

Sony would probably have followed suit and pushed its Move stuff harder were it not busy pushing its latest attempt to make another ruddy handheld device, the Vita. But the end result of Sony’s press conference was the same: namely, lots of time devoted to pushing another casual gaming device at the expense of spotlighting the PS3′s upcoming ‘proper’ games.

And then we have Nintendo. Which spent pretty much its entire press conference trying – and completely failing – to get over just how the hell the new tablet-like ‘joystick’ for its new Wii U console might work. We’re happy to be proved wrong, but right now we find the whole idea of having to handle two totally separate screens while gaming, one in our hand and one on our TV, not only impractical but plain preposterous. It’s no surprise to us that Nintendo’s shares plummeted nearly 10% in the days following the Wii U’s official unveiling.

And the winner of the 'E3 2011 WTF Award' goes to...

All the press conferences by the big three console giants ultimately did was provide a depressing snapshot of what really bothers us about the whole social/casual gaming ‘boom’. Namely that it’s eating disproportionately heavily into precious marketing and development money and time that could be spent on creating and pushing really good games.

Usually we’d be coming away from E3 buzzing about the coolest games we’ve got to look forward to. This year we’re struggling to think of a single title that really caught our interest. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the general sense of disillusionment each press conference inspired in us was so overwhelming that we just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for anything.

We’re not being elitist here; we accept that social gaming has its (small) place. We’re just passionate about the way a disproportionate interest in the social gaming market on the part of the console makers is slowly destroying a hobby we love. After all, pretty much everyone we know with any interest in gaming is bemoaning the E3 press conferences by the big three console brands as uniformly awful, which underlines our growing belief that the console makers have lost sight of what matters to the real life-blood of any console: the hardcore gamers.

It’s hardcore gamers who play games a lot rather than occasionally, and so it’s hardcore gamers who buy far and away the most games. And no matter how many units a console might have sold, if that console doesn’t sell enough games, game development companies will go under, and ultimately fewer and fewer games will get made.

So we politely urge, nay beg the three console brands to realise as soon as possible that their relentless march towards casual gaming is actually threatening their whole long-term business. For if things carry on as they are, we can see ourselves and many of our gaming mates doing a ‘Why Don’t You?’, and just switching off our consoles for good and going out to do something less boring instead.

In general, this is a convergence-style shift we’re happy to embrace. Having catch up TV services like the BBC iPlayer installed directly onto your TV rather than only being able to get at them via you PC just makes sense.

However, while Smart TVs are essentially a positive development, it’s already become apparent to us that the TV brands need to realise that with Smart TV functionality – as with so many things in life – the key to success is quality, not quantity.

As things stand at the moment, all the TV brands seem to be caught up in an unseemly stampede to add as many services and apps as possible, with little if any thought to how useful those services might be. They just want to be able to say they’ve got more apps and services than their rivals in some sort of obscene Smart TV todger measuring exercise.

But as with all todger measuring exercises, this one is really pretty silly. For the plain and simple fact of the matter is that as things stand right now, at least half the apps found on most of the Smart TV platforms are utterly pointless. Or laughably crap. Or both.

For instance, does anyone really want an app on their TV that tells them how to tie a tie? Does anyone really want their TV to do a Tarot card reading for them? Does anyone really want their TV to teach them yoga? Does anyone really want to play mostly shit games on their TVs when they can play good ones on so many other ‘proper’ gaming devices? Does anyone really want to use their TV to listen to the dulcet tones of tunes played on wine glasses? All these apps and others like them really do exist on TVs right now, we assure you.

Putting rubbish apps on TVs frankly damages the whole credibility of the Smart TV experience, and potentially means people will stop using Smart TV features after their first incredulous delve. Perhaps worse, the more rubbish apps you put on your Smart TV service, the more they clutter up the interface and dilute the good stuff, making it more frustrating for people to find the apps and services they really want.

The sensible way ahead for Smart TVs is clear, so far as we’re concerned. Stick by and large with video stuff.

Watching video is, after all, what your TV was designed to do, and more or less the only thing that people want it to do. TVs are a shared device, the focal point of a typical family’s leisure time, and so they simply don’t suit weird and often not at all wonderful apps aimed at individual users. Instead Smart TV ‘apps’ should be focussed on either releasing home photos and videos from their PC ‘prisons’, or providing people with alternative sources of on-demand video beyond the normal broadcast channels.

So: The BBC iPlayer found on almost all Smart TV services now is good. The Demand Five catch up service available on Sony TVs and, soon, Samsung Smart TVs is good. The Sky News video app on Sony’s online TVs is good. Samsung’s recently launched 3D content portal is good (in principle, though at the moment the content level is uninspiring). Sony’s streamable vault of classic TV series is good. Eurosport’s video news service is good. Even YouTube isn’t bad aside from the interface for finding the clips you want tending to be a bit fiddly on TVs. You get the idea.

With this in mind, manufacturers might want to take note that we currently rate Sony’s Bravia Internet Video platform as the most satisfying and usable of the Smart TV systems currently available. Not because it’s got the biggest number of services or apps on it, but because it focusses almost exclusively on video streaming services. In other words, it recognises that when all’s said and done, rather than being a phone, a PC or a tablet, a telly – even a Smart one – is basically still a telly.

For instance, Blu-ray won the HD disc format war even though it wasn’t anywhere near as ‘finished’ a technology as HD DVD. Pioneer had to pull out of the plasma TV market despite making easily the best plasma TVs in the business.  And most famously – and appropriately – of all, VHS saw off Betamax in the 1980s despite Betamax producing the best picture quality. Well, according to Sony, anyway.

In fact, the further the currently virulent active vs passive 3D scrap plays out, the more uncanny the similarities with the classic VHS/Betamax war seem to get.

As we said at the start, from what we’ve seen so far (check out the recent reviews of Panasonic’sP50GT30 and LG’s 55LW650T), while far from perfect, active 3D produces the best 3D picture quality, at least in resolution terms.

The LG 55LW650T

However, the big question is, do many people really care about getting the ultimate quality where 3D is concerned? Unlike HD, which seemed to generate near-universal excitement when it first appeared, our experience is that the public seems at best indifferent about 3D, at worst plain cynical about it.

What’s more, even the people who care about 3D will probably only find themselves watching it occasionally – for a big film, or maybe a big sports event. Unlike HD, 3D is not going to be something you try and watch all the time.

This all raises serious questions about how much people might be willing to pay for 3D on their TV. For if people see 3D in a casual light, as something they might indulge in occasionally for a bit of fun, it seems highly unlikely that they’ll want to invest much money in it. And if you want 3D without it costing very much, you’re looking squarely at passive models.

After all, as well as LG’s new passive sets tending to be slightly cheaper than other brands’ equivalent active 3D models, they’re also all shipping with seven pairs of free 3D glasses included. Compare this with Panasonic’s new mid-range 3D active plasma TVs, the GT30 series, where you don’t get any free glasses at all. Or Samsung’s new D7000/D8000 active 3D TVs, with which you only get one free pair of glasses. With active 3D shuttering glasses costing around £100 a pair (vs £2 for LG’s polarised models), you’ll have to add a frankly scary £700 and £600 respectively to the prices of the Panasonic and Samsung active 3D TVs if you want to end up with as many pairs of glasses as you get thrown in free with LG’s passive sets.

For people with large families, limited budgets and/or lots of friends, this sort of active 3D accessory expenditure really could be a deal breaker.

Panasonic's P50GT30

It also has to be said that despite – for numerous reasons – not producing the full quality of an HD 3D source, LG’s new passive 3D pictures are far from horrible to watch. In fact, they’re significantly less tiring to watch over long periods of time than active 3D pictures. This is especially true if you’ve got a lot of ambient light in your room, since ambient light can emphasise the flickering effect you get with active shutter glasses.

Also potentially significant is the fact that passive glasses are no-brainers to use. You just put them on. There are no buttons to press; there’s no recharging to be done; you can use them with friends’ passive 3D TVs or at most 3D cinemas. Hell, you can even wear them as normal sunglasses within reason.

All this and we haven’t even mentioned the fact that LG’s managed to secure a ‘first choice’ cross-promotion deal with arguably the UK’s biggest 3D force, Sky.

Let’s sum all this up. You’ve got a new picture format, full HD 3D, that’s only going to be watched occasionally, and most likely in biggish family or friend groups. And in one camp you’ve got a ‘Betamax’ format which gets the most out of the new format’s HD performance capabilities but costs more, is more of a faff to use, and requires you to cough up £100 for each extra pairs of 3D glasses you need. While in the other camp, you’ve got a ‘VHS’ technology that doesn’t quite deliver the maximum 3D experience, but is still engaging to watch and is cheap (in a time of recession), simple and convenient. Put all that together and for better of for worse, the current mass market answer to the 3D conundrum appears to be passive.

It’s not impossible for the active 3D camp to turn this situation around. But if it’s going to succeed, we reckon two things need to happen. First, active 3D glasses need to start getting much cheaper – fast. And second, the public at large needs to be persuaded to take 3D much more seriously than it does right now, so it might actually feel the need to spend more on getting the best out of it.

In short, the active 3D camp needs Avatar 2. Which is a bit worrying given a) how long it took to make the first one, and b) that its director, James Cameron, has recently come down in favour of passive 3D TVs…

Our feeling then was that while the security breach was something that should never have happened, it would all have blown over in a couple of days.

However, here we are on May 7^th, the best part of three weeks after Sony’s servers were compromised, and still the PSN is ‘down for maintenance’. And at the time of writing there’s still no date being given for when the service might go live again.

For us, the enormous time it’s taking for Sony to sort the problem out changes everything so far as the damage from the incident is concerned.

First, it’s making everyone increasingly aware of/scared by just how compromised Sony’s online system clearly was by this incident. We’d expected a couple of days would be enough to close what we presumed was a fairly small ‘exploit’ found by the hacker. But with every day that passes with the PSN down, the more gaping and fundamental we start to imagine the network’s security problems must be. It’s starting to feel as if the entire PSN system is having to be rebuilt from the ground up rather than just receiving a couple of quick patches. Harsh though it sounds, this fundamentally damages confidence in the competence of the PSN, and the people who engineered it.

It also makes us remember our initial impressions of the PS3 when it first appeared; namely that it was a crazily – though admirably – over-ambitious console that had to be rushed to market so as not to give the Xbox 360 any more of a head start than it already had. It’s impossible not to think that the hacking incident and apparently huge problems with fixing the security breach are at least partly the results of this unseemly rush to get the console and its attendant online platform on sale.

Another potentially huge consequence of the protracted PSN outage is a simple loss of cold, hard cash for Sony’s coffers. Not being able to mine 77 million subscribers for money every day must be costing Sony a fortune in lost revenue – hardly ideal at a time when the brand is already struggling in one of the toughest, most competitive AV environments it’s ever been faced with.

It can hardly have helped Sony’s straining coffers, either, that the extended loss of the PSN has forced the brand into a recently announced confidence-building exercise whereby it’s promising to give each and every one of its subscribers a million dollars worth of identity theft insurance, as well as two free PS3/PSN games.

And then, of course, there’s always the potential for people bringing lawsuits against Sony should they believe that the theft of their personal details from the PSN has resulted in their financial affairs being compromised.

It’s not just Sony’s bottom line that’s being hit hard by the extended PSN outage either. Spare a thought for all the independent developers who’ve developed games for sale exclusively via the PSN but who are currently earning nothing for their efforts. Losing the service for even a day or two could have been potentially devastating for some network game developers’ profit models, especially given the often quite small window of opportunity such games have for making a splash. It’s entirely possible that some of these developers might go to the wall if the PSN continues to be down for much longer, while others might start to think twice about whether they can trust the PSN enough as a development platform.

It’s by no means beyond the bounds of possibility, either, that some of the small developers hardest hit by the lost days of PSN service might be able to sue Sony for lost revenue, depending on the T&C’s these developers have signed up to.

And still we haven’t got to the worst side effect for Sony of the prolonged loss of the PS3’s online services: the destruction of trust and faith among the console’s user base.

So big a part of many people’s daily lives is gaming now that we can easily imagine many erstwhile devoted Sony followers becoming so disillusioned and frustrated at not being able to indulge their online gaming addiction for day after day that they’re first becoming angry with Sony, and then taking that a step further and decamping to the Xbox platform.

Think, too, of the immense pain that must be being felt right now by so-called Sony fanboys. How can they slag off their Xbox counterparts with the same confidence and aggression when their own beloved console has been on its knees for so long? In fact, so colossal is the PSN situation becoming now that it’s going to be hard for fanboys to ever really recover their swagger, as their pro-PS3 eulogising can now forever be met with derisory hoots from the Xbox fraternity about the ‘weeks the PSN died’.

This fanboy stuff all sounds childish, of course. And it is. But the almost tribal allegiance of some elements of the gaming world to their preferred console platform can be a key element in a console’s level of success, and if such people can no longer feel proud of their console, then they may feel they can no longer support it.

The bottom line for Sony is that every day the PSN remains dead increases the chance of losing the trust and support of an ever-greater chunk of its fanbase. And if you lose enough of your fanbase in this tri-console era, then you run the risk of losing, well, everything.

Out first vague feelings of anger over this subject welled up in 2009, as the supposedly democratic European Union decided on our behalf that it would be quite happy to ban big plasma TVs if they didn’t meet its stringent new energy-consumption targets. “Minimum energy performance standards for televisions are expected to be agreed across Europe this spring, and this should lead to phasing out the most inefficient TV,” said the EU at the time.

Er, what? However much we might be concerned about planetary well being, we certainly weren’t comfortable with having our TV technology of choice summarily dismissed from the AV scene by a bunch of politicians whose knowledge of TVs likely runs no deeper than how to get big ones through on expenses. If ever there was an EU issue that demanded a democratic referendum, it was this!! Probably.

One of those evil plasma tellies. Scary.

Towards the end of 2009 things got even crazier, as California managed the frankly remarkable feat of out-doing the EU in taking its powers/obsessions too undemocratically far. For the Californian Energy Commission announced the most incredibly restrictive energy requirements for TVs anywhere in the world. And crucially, these power requirements shifted from focusing on TV standby power to focusing on the power used when a TV is switched on.

The way California’s targets – which you had to hit if you wanted your TV to be allowed to sell in the state – focussed on the power used when a TV is on effectively marked the most overt declaration yet that a government body believed it had the right to interfere with our TV image quality.

For let’s be quite clear about this: imposing Draconian energy targets on the TV world stops TVs from being able to function as well as they might. At least with today’s TV tech.

We’ve had a nagging suspicion about this ever since the 2009 measures were introduced. So much so that whenever we get the chance, we try to find out exactly how TV makers are keeping their LCD and plasma TVs ‘on eco message’, within the imposed targets. And invariably, while some of the energy reduction is put down to good, old-fashioned technological innovation, there’s always at least a hint – often accompanied by a rueful grin – that some of the power savings are also down to the TV brands effectively compromising picture quality, usually by limiting brightness or processing power, or both.

With this in mind, it’s not surprising that many of the hardware manufacturers were incensed by California’s move, on the grounds that they didn’t feel they’d been properly included in the process by which California came up with its energy use limits, and also because they thought they were doing a pretty good job of continually reducing energy consumption themselves, in conjunction with natural competition and the previously respected Energy Star project.

California and Europe’s moves also showed an insulting lack of understanding of just how seriously the main AV brands already took environmental issues. All the big names have been almost obsessively driven by Green concerns for many years, seeing the reduction of their carbon footprints and the energy consumption of their products as a badge of honour well before California and the EU stuck their oars in. So to be made to look like some kind of energy-guzzling demons by the posturing of political institutions was just plain unfair and a slap in the face of a fiercely proud industry.

After the initial Californian furore died down, though, the manufacturers quickly just got on with doing what they had to do. In fact, they sometimes now almost seem proud of the picture ‘compromises’ they have to keep making to keep power levels to a minimum.

Videophiles that we are, though, HDWars finds the idea of being forced to buy TVs with potentially reduced performance standards based on some headline-grabbing but utterly unreasonable government dictums more than a little irritating.

Our feelings along these lines have become especially true with the advent of 3D. For instance, during our recent tour of Panasonic’s Himeji LCD factory, a Panasonic spokesman said ruefully that its 3D LED sets were having to run using slightly more power than Panasonic’s non-3D models. But while he seemed apologetic about this, we don’t mind admitting that we were sat there thinking more along the lines of ‘sod the bit of extra power; we’d rather have lots of extra power if it helps combat the notorious  brightness loss issues associated with active 3D technology and its active shutter glasses.’

Our concerns over this become even stronger when thinking about plasma TVs. For while plasma technology is arguably inherently better suited to active 3D playback, thanks to its lightning-fast response times, 3D playback on domestic 3D plasma TVs has suffered with a pretty universal lack of brightness. And it’s hard not to think that this frustrating problem is at least partly down to the plasma manufacturers having to work within the unrealistically tough power laws set by a couple of overblown political institutions.

What’s particularly undemocratic about this is that the Californian and European guidelines basically affect most of the world, for it’s clearly unrealistic to expect TV brands to build completely different models for different territories based on local energy laws.

Maybe our moaning about this issue makes us bad people. Maybe we should just swallow getting less picture quality for our buck as a small price to pay for healing our broken planet. We also think striving for more energy efficient TVs is a good thing, and recognize that setting REASONABLE power targets can help focus minds.

So we honestly don’t feel like we’re the ones being unreasonable here. All we’re asking is that our political representatives trust the actually very strong self-regulatory instincts of the AV industry. That way they can keep improving energy consumption at a pace dictated by competition and natural technological innovation, rather than being forced to rush power consumption reductions before the rest of their TV technology has had chance to catch up.

But the more we thought about it, the more appropriate the blog seemed to be. So with a heavy heart, here goes…

As we boarded our Japan Airlines flight with our local Panasonic representative on Sunday February 27^th, we thought we knew what we were going to get. The packed itinerary – a staple of any trip to Japan, where it seems a point of honour to make sure that no visiting journalist gets a spare minute – stated that we were going to visit an LCD factory, a plasma factory, a recycling centre, the Konusuke Matsushita Museum, and finally Panasonic’s Kadoma headquarters in Osaka, where we were to spend an entire day engaging in in-depth discussions with key Panasonic staff and engineers about the technology involved with the brand’s 2011 TV range.

In other words, we expected to come back from Japan with a sense of the true scale of Panasonic’s global operations, a healthy comprehension of what goes into making Panasonic’s TVs usually so impressive, and probably an unhealthy case of jetlag. What we certainly didn’t expect was to come back with both a different view of the nature of business and even, we sheepishly have to admit, a genuine desire to try and be better people.

It all began predictably enough. We dragged ourselves from our Osaka Hilton beds after barely four hours of sleep, assembled with various other UK and European journalists in the hotel lobby, and before we’d barely even realized we were in Japan, we were in a bus on the two-hour drive to Panasonic’s new Himeji LCD factory.

Having opened in April 2010 as the IPS Alpha Technology Himeji Co Ltd, by the time the plant was renamed Panasonic Liquid Crystal Display Co. Ltd in October 2010, it was already churning out the equivalent of 405,000 32in LCD panels a month, ready to be shipped to Panasonic’s flat panel TV assembly sites around the world.

By the time we arrived on March 1^st (as the first people from outside Japan to ever set foot in the factory), production had staggeringly doubled to more than 800,000 panels per month. And it was easy to see why. For from the sterile, fourth-floor viewing platform that was the closest we could get to the factory floor, all we could see heading off into the distance were seven huge rows of seemingly identical production lines, operating almost entirely without human assistance.

You could see the lines taking in huge sheets of LCD motherglass before cutting them down to different final screen sizes, forensically cleaning everything, and finally preparing the finished LCD glass ready for sending elsewhere to be incorporated into the rest of the LCD TV chassis.

The fact that the Himeji plant’s 361,000m2 site is exclusively dedicated to the production of just one part of an LCD TV, the screen, makes the scale of the operation even more mindblowing.

It was interesting to note, too, how keen Panasonic was to stress the Himeji factory’s ‘green’ credentials – stuff like the introduction of a system for recycling 100% of the water used by the factory, reducing CO2 emissions by 33%, and reducing the energy used in producing a 32in TV by 20% from previous levels. The clear pride and importance Panasonic attached to these ecological achievements would become a recurring feature of the trip.

What really turned the trip on its head, though, was stage two of our first day in Japan: the trip to the Konosuke Matsushita Museum.

Little did we suspect that what was supposed to be an exclusive review would descend into the sort of high farce that makes you wonder if you’re actually still living on the same planet as everyone else.

The trouble actually began when we first approached LG about getting a CF3D delivered to our test room for review. Initially they gave us an enthusiastic yes, even promising to also send one of the ‘silver’ screens necessary for enjoying the sort of passive 3D images the CF3D delivers. But the next day LG changed its mind, deciding it wasn’t prepared to send out any product worth more than £5,000. (The CF3D costs not far shy of 13 grand.)

Needless to say this was a bit of a pisser – especially as Panasonic had thought nothing of sorting us out with a 42 grand 85VX200 plasma TV just the week before, while we had one of JVC’s £6000 DLA-X7 projectors set up in our room even as we were reading LG’s change-of-mind email.

Peace-loving souls that we are, though, we kindly offered to test the projector on LG’s own premises instead. This, happily, was acceptable to LG, and so we duly rolled up in a grey and wet Slough with a bunch of our preferred 3D Blu-rays tucked inside our bag.

A very lovely PR lady and friendly LG representative showed us to the room where we were to test the CF3D – commenting rather alarmingly en route about how they didn’t understand why we needed a full day to test the projector when they thought 15 minutes should be enough… On reflection, that itself should have been enough to get alarm bells ringing.

Then we entered the room selected for our tests and, frankly, we couldn’t believe our eyes.

For a start, the room wasn’t some carefully constructed projector demo suite. Oh no. In fact it was a simple meeting room. Complete with five huge floor-to-ceiling windows. And were these windows blacked out? Nope. Four had normal roller blinds on them, but these let in huge quantities of light around their edges. The fifth one, meanwhile, had a weird beige blind on it that let so much light through it might as well not have been there. And this last window was right next to the place where LG had decided in its infinite wisdom to put the screen for our tests. Basically we might as well have been testing the CF3D in a field.

Our obvious dissatisfaction at this set up led to the single most incredulous moment of the whole sorry day, as our now-nervous LG representative stumbled across a discarded lumberjack shirt in a corner, and tried to hang it off a chair in front of the beige window in a phenomenally futile bid to reduce the light blaring into the room. We’d probably have laughed like loons at this had we not just driven for two and a half hours to get to LG’s HQ for a review that already clearly wasn’t now going to be doable.

As for the screen LG had set up, this too was a joke. For a start, it sported a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the 16:9 one anyone with the slightest interest in home cinema would expect. Much worse, though, were the horrendous creases and marks lying right across the screen’s centre. These creases were deep and as much as a foot tall, making it hard to focus on the image behind them. Especially when watching 3D, where having ‘2D’ creases lying across the surface of a 3D image looked simply horrible.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the screen LG had selected was a high-gain ‘daytime use’ one – the complete opposite of what any serious home cinema user would want. Not surprisingly, this high-gain screen suffered with a distractingly shiny finish and noticeable brightness hotspots.

With our review hopes already thoroughly dashed, we turned our attentions to the CF3D projector itself almost as an afterthought. Only to find more signs of astonishing incompetence.

For a start, the projector was propped up on a chunky LG sign to make sure the picture was high enough to hit the screen. And this was causing the edges of the images to angle-in at the bottom quite acutely. Blimey. Surely a projector at the CF3D’s level would have optical vertical image shifting? Or at least keystone correction? Actually, it has both. But did the LG rep dealing with this hugely expensive, potentially massively influential LG product know anything about either of them? No.

It was up to us to locate a slide-forward flap on the projector’s top edge and the simple vertical shift wheel underneath it, so we could dispense with the LG sign ‘prop’ and get the image in place without any horrible distortions.

Sitting glumly down to try and at least get some vague clue about the CF3D’s potential despite the room conditions uncovered further trouble. For on finding the projector sounding quite noisy, we decided to turn down the lamp output to ease the burdens on the projector’s cooling fans. Only to find the relevant option in the menus disabled, seemingly on the grounds that this projector we were supposed to be formally testing was actually only a pre-production sample. Brilliant.

Finding our already futile efforts to calibrate the CF3D in such a room environment further foiled by the absence of any colour management tools in the onscreen menus, all we could do was pop on one of LG’s cheap passive 3D glasses and try to imagine we were watching the CF3D in a Sky 3D-equipped pub or club – the environment we suspect it was really designed for.

But even here we immediately felt a sense of crushing disappointment. For the 3D images clearly suffered badly with crosstalk ‘double ghosting’ noise – something we really hadn’t expected given the CF3D’s passive 3D nature.

Raising our concerns about this with an LG product ‘expert’ who wandered in for a minute or two but clearly didn’t really know what we were talking about, it became apparent that there was just no point sticking around for any longer. Enough life had been wasted already.

So we bid our goodbyes with all the politeness we could muster, and hit the road home. Wondering for every minute of the 160-minute return trip just how on earth a company as big as LG could be treating such a potentially important product – and actually, by extension, us – with such astonishingly amateurish disdain.

If we can persuade the LG person who put their foot down about sending the CF3D out to respected journalists to instead put their efforts into giving their hugely expensive product a chance of looking half decent, maybe we’ll get a CF3D delivered to our test room and give it the in-depth review it possibly deserves. Then again, maybe we’ll just follow LG’s lead and take receipt of it, prop it up on the patio one bright morning, point it at the shed wall, and somehow expect it not to look shit.