It seems that fans of the new “Real” 3D effect really will need to slap down the extra coin for a 3DTV. I was on one of my Best Buy excursions yesterday and who do I bump into but Mr. My Take Radio himself, Rich. Being the tech junkies that we are, we look at all the new home theater equipment and notice that the Magnolia section had a 3D setup. We wanted to compare this one to our experience at the Sony store, especially since the setup here was Panasonic (2009’s top 5 rated televisions were from Panasonic or Samsung, no Sony models). The picture itself was of course beautiful but the 3D was severely lacking compared to what we had experienced with the Sony model. First and foremost, the Panasonic glasses felt cheap. The 3D lenses sit off of your face and they look and feel like a clip on. Worse than that, a lot of the 3D effects seemed to not come off the screen while others did. To Panasonic’s credit, the perspective effect was awesome even when the 3D was not. If you move to a different viewing angle, the 3D effect adjusts to your position. The mistake we made was that we thought the TV was a 3D TV; it was not. It was a Panasonic Plasma hooked to a Panasonic 3D Blu-Ray player. What we concluded this will mean is that people who for example have a PS3 and get the 3D firmware upgrade will have what I am calling a gimped 3D experience if they choose to not buy a 3D TV. I have said on the show that the TV in the Sony store was playing LittleBigPlanet, a game not designed for 3D and the effect was quite pronounced. So as of right now, if you have a 3D player, but a 2D TV, you will not get as vivid an experience as someone who has a 3DTV and a standard player. Of course the optimal situation would be to have both if you want to enjoy 3D, but I hope that future upgrades will make it so that anyone can truly enjoy 3D (if they want to) with any combination.