Roger Ebert explains why the format must be stopped. Not as an option, he says, but as a way of life. 3-D should not become the new standard. It can be fun on a nice big-&-bright IMAX screen like Avatar (the only 3-D IMAX ive seen outside of a museum) but when I saw UP and Alice and Wonderland on a regular screen in 3-D, I was left seriously disappointed in the experience vs the extra ticket price…
That’s my position. I know it’s heresy to the biz side of show business. After all, 3-D has not only given Hollywood its biggest payday ($2.7 billion and counting for Avatar), but a slew of other hits. The year’s top three films—Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—were all projected in 3-D, and they’re only the beginning. The very notion of Jackass in 3-D may induce a wave of hysterical blindness, to avoid seeing Steve-O’s you-know-what in that way. But many directors, editors, and cinematographers agree with me about the shortcomings of 3-D. So do many movie lovers—even executives who feel stampeded by another Hollywood infatuation with a technology that was already pointless when their grandfathers played with stereoscopes.
That’s the summary and it’s really all you need, but if you’re thirsty for more detail you can go read the heretics’ case, point by point.
Ebert acknowledges that Avatar was awesome in 3D-IMAX but points out what I’ve been saying on that in how it was a movie made mostly on computers specifically for the purpose of being 3D. When movies add 3D as an afterthought, it sucks horribly, and its not a medium that is suited to anything other than kids and action films (Ebert brings up Fargo, Casablanca and Precious as “can you imagine that shit in 3D” examples).
The article contains info that explains the details of things like the darker picture in more complex ways:
Lenny Lipton is known as the father of the electronic stereoscopic-display industry. He knows how films made with his systems should look. Current digital projectors, he writes, are “intrinsically inefficient. Half the light goes to one eye and half to the other, which immediately results in a 50 percent reduction in illumination.” Then the glasses themselves absorb light. The vast majority of theaters show 3-D at between three and six foot-lamberts (fLs). Film projection provides about 15fLs. The original IMAX format threw 22fLs at the screen. If you don’t know what a foot-lambert is, join the crowd. (In short: it’s the level of light thrown on the screen from a projector with no film in it.) And don’t mistake a standard film for an IMAX film, or “fake IMAX” for original IMAX. What’s the difference? IMAX is building new theaters that have larger screens, which are quite nice, but are not the huge IMAX screens and do not use IMAX film technology. But since all their theaters are called IMAX anyway, this is confusing.
confusing indeed.