Avatar 3D

Our New Year's Eve movie was Avatar 3D. The Blu-ray disc was a promotional bonus with a recently purchased Panasonic player and I was eager to watch a 3D movie on our new Samsung TV. Although we had watched a few shorts/cartoons using the Samsung's built-in internet application, this was our first full length 3D movie.

Avatar is one long, weird movie but I was very impressed with the 3D version. The visual effects are pretty amazing and some scenes, such as those showing the characters using holographic computer displays, really benefited from 3D. I'm not sure that a regular movie, say True Grit, would benefit from 3D but Avatar seemed pretty well-suited for it. We paused the movie a couple of times for short breaks (we were also doing a couple loads of laundry) but I don't think it would have been a problem had we watched straight through - at least no problem for my eyes - my rear end probably benefited from the breaks more than my eyes. I did, however, have some really weird dreams last night.

Although I originally thought the Blu-ray disc included only the 3D version, the 2D version is on there, too. But, I'm guessing I won't ever watch the movie again or any sequel. It might seem odd that as an amateur astronomer I'm not much of a sci-fi fan but that's the case and Avatar was just a bit too weird for me. I would still recommend the 3D Avatar movie for a 3D experience, though. It was compelling, to me, that the production of the film (according to Wikipedia) made use of 4,000 HP servers and 35,000 processor cores and each minute of final footage occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage. I might not be a fan of sci-fi but I am a geek.

I saw 3D Toy Story at the local movie theater and have seen a couple of 3D IMAX films (International Space Station was great). In comparison, I found the Samsung 3D glasses (model SSG3100GB) at least as comfortable/non-distracting as the movie glasses and we experienced no problems whatsoever with them - no flickering, loss of sync or such.