Panasonic has sold their entire US allotment of 3D Plasma TV bundles in just one week.
Despite an eye-watering price of $2899.99 for a 50-inch plasma TV, one set of 3D glasses and a 3D Blu-Ray player, the bundle appears to have found incredible success. A shocked Hitoshi Otsuki, Senior Managing Director for Panasonic’s overseas operations, said, “It’s a great opportunity to turn around our TV business.”
Do these strong sales indicate that 3D TV has finally arrived? It’s tough to tell.
Electronics market analysts aren’t completely convinced. Kaz Miura, an analyst at Tokyo’s Daiwa Securities Capital Markets group said that the announcement is driven by early adopters with deep pockets. “There are always people who want to buy high-end products,” he said. “That’s probably what’s driving sales.”
In the short term, a lack of content will certainly hamper sales. Other analysts, such as Ichiro Michikochi, cite these issues as the reason why the medium hasn’t matured further. “It will probably take a long time for 3-D TVs to expand broadly, maybe about three years,” Michikochi said. “There isn’t enough content and consumers dislike wearing the glasses. Those issues will take time to be solved.”
These are certainly promising early signs for the medium. However, it remains to be seen whether or not content offerings will expand quickly enough to make 3D the new HD. We’ll be watching closely, though.
I love 3D content. I just hate the glasses. We should wait till they develop filters which give stereoscopic effect without the glasses, with better viewing angles. I also prefer polarized glasses (the ones they use in theaters) to the shutter glasses they are currently packing with this batch of 3D TV's. Polarized glasses don't require power, so they are cheaper and lighter, and can be mass produced, unlike expensive shutter glasses. Most of these sets are shipping with only 2 pairs of shutter glasses, meaning you have to buy more at $100+ a pop.
Wearing glasses is really uncomfortable, I have nVidias 3D technology for PC and hardly use it any more.
How many units was the allotment? Knowing that would go a long way to telling whether this was a runaway success launch or not..
Panasonic never had any stock to start with! They just wanted to launch before Samsung who had been stockpiling a realistic launch volume of stock since January 2010. At most Panasonic would have sold less than a few hundred unit; maybe even less than a hundred unit. Most stores didn't receive any stock.