14 DAY TRIAL // Zalman, the cooling solution provider, have announced at the beginning of the year that they are working on a 3D display, which has even been exhibited at Consumer Electronics Association. Now, Zalman has made it official: the 3D monitors will be out in time for Christmas.
Zalman's three-dimensional displays use a pair of polarizing filters in front of the screen, in combination with a pair of 3D glasses. Luckily for the fancy gamer, there are not the cardboard type, with red and green filters. Instead, they look like a pair of sunglasses, polarized at different angles.
This technique makes the eye receive the picture from a slightly different perspective. And thus tricks the brain into thinking it is seeing a true 3D image. The new approach eliminates the need to alternate images and removes the flicker, which diminishes the risk of induced headaches and eye tension or side effects such as dizziness or nausea.
The three-D experience varies with the rendered content. Apart from the promo movies that accompany Zalman's display and giving the user an acute sense of 3D (swimming fish that transcend the monitor), there is no other specially filmed video content at the time.
On the other side, the gaming experience is truly amazing, although there is a limited amount of 3D-ready games. The testing has been done on Painkiller, and the 3D feel was most than satisfactory, especially when circling around the on-screen objects.
The only issue to prevent all the games from enjoying the 3D look and feel (apart from owning the display, of course) is the fact that the monitors generate a 3D effect only in conjunction with Nvidia's video cards. The drivers supports up to 7 GeForce cards for DirectX 9 games running on Windows XP only, but the producers say that there will be a Vista driver for series 8 cards soon.
The three dimensional displays ship in 19-inch and 22-inch versions (ZM-M190W and ZM-M220W, respectively) and will be available for the UK market in mid-December, at a fair price of ?380-?430.