Toshiba ZL2 glasses-free 3D TV price announced – £6999
Orders open from Monday 12th March
Toshiba has announced a UK date and price for the world’s first big-screen glasses-free 3D TV. Small screen devices have been launched before, mainly in Japan, but now you can have a glasses-free TV dominating your living room. Or at least you can if you’re a premier league footballer or investment banker, as the price is an eye-watering £6,999.
We already saw the Toshiba 55ZL2 at IFA last year, and its 3D capabilities didn’t blow us away. It certainly does what it’s supposed too, but moving your head results in a fine noisy mess at the edge of objects. Still, for day-to-day 3D viewing it’s certainly a lot better than having to wear glasses. There’s not a huge amount of 3D content on offer of course, but returning to footballers, we can see this TV being most use in a household where every Sky 3D game is watched religiously.
More exciting than the glasses-free 3D possibly, is the 4K panel that creates the effect, also the first time such technology has been put on sale to consumers in the UK. Out of 3D mode you can make use of the full resolution of 3,840×2,160. This provides astounding detail if you’re looking at your digital photos, or playing games at ludicrous detail levels.
Today we saw a range of 4K demos, which were undeniably impressive. Still images looked incredibly sharp, while upscaled Blu-ray video was nicely sharpened up by Toshiba’s CEVO image-processing engine – there’s also a local dimming backlight here, so you’re not sacrificing contrast for detail. The demo room is very dark, so we couldn’t get any good new pictures of the set.
The price will deter all but the richest or most determined home cinema buffs. The TV will only be on sale in John Lewis and Harrods too, but if you get a chance to pop in for a look at the future of TV, then we highly recommend it. John Lewis will start taking orders from Monday the 12th of March