When it comes to achieving top cinematic quality at home, 3D televisions are the ideal way of making this dream a reality. Bringing the 3D experience of a movie theater directly into a viewer’s home was a bold move that caused a lot of excitement in home theater enthusiast circles.

The Technological Difference Between Active 3D and Passive 3D:

Active 3D is the technology that the first generation of 3D TVs debuted with, spearheaded by Samsung in 2010. Active 3D uses battery-powered 3D glasses which have LCD 'shutters' over each lens. When 3D content is being shown, the LCD glasses darken to block the lens of each eye of the 3D glasses sequentially, in sync with the 3D TV itself. The 3D TV shows sequential frames of 3D footage to each eye. Because one lens is blocked out, only particular video frames are shown to the right eye, and only particular frames are shown to the left eye. The frames shown to the left eye are shifted horizontally compared to the frames shown to the right eye; this horizontal shift is what makes video look 3D. Each frame contains a full 1080 lines in active 3D.

Passive 3D uses the same basic concept as active 3D — the video frames shown to each eye are off-set against each other to produce a simulated 3D effect. However, passive 3D does not use any fancy technology in the glasses. Instead, each lens is polarised; the left lens is polarised oppositely to the right lens. It's complicated, but essentially each line of pixels on a passive 3D TV is polarised to only display video frames to either the left or the right eye of a pair of polarised 3D glasses; there are 1080 lines in a Full HD TV, so 540 lines for each eye.

PROS:

• Active 3D glasses are able to display more detail to each eye, this means that the video will have cleaner lines, especially on curves and edges. If high quality video is crucially important to you, active 3D is the choice to make.
• Passive 3D glasses will always convert the image on the screen into the proper image viewable by the user’s eyes.
• Passive 3D glasses are inexpensive and universal in the sense that anyone can use any glasses from other manufacturers, or even the glasses found in movie theaters.

CONS:

• Active 3D glasses only convert the image when they are "on" and functioning.

• Active 3D glasses, which must be purchased from the same manufacturer that the television was purchased from

• Some viewers are sensitive to flicker and get nausea and/or headaches from Active 3D Glasses.

• Active 3D glasses are heavier than passive glasses due to having an inbuilt battery and circuitry, as well as thicker lenses, which contain the LCD shutters.