Hands On: Monster Vision Max 3D Glasses
Posted on Monday June 13, 2011, 17:24 by James Dyer in Empire States
The thing with 3D TVs is that, generally speaking, they only come with one pair of glasses. Sure, you can send off for a second pair but they’re far from cheap and, because each manufacturer’s frames are only compatible with their own sets, you need to start again if you upgrade your display. Sounds like a niche in the market and cable giant Monster has stepped in to fill it with the Monster Vision 3D Max glasses: a pair of catch-all, universally compatible 3D specs that you can use at home, at a friend’s and anywhere else you happen to encounter a 3D telly.
The frames themselves are pleasingly large, coming in a large, Buddy Holly-esque design and instantly providing greater peripheral 3D vision than the specs that came with out office set. Setting them up is simple enough: if your TV has a 3D sync port then you’re laughing – just plug in the glasses’ base unit and away you go. Ours didn’t, unfortunately, but Monster has thought of that too and a small IR sensor is also included, which can be placed in front of your TV’s emitter until it picks up the signal manually and blinks happily with its little green lights. We actually had some difficulty in this department but once we’d successfully identified the correct sensor to position it by (the problem with snazzy, aesthetic TVs is that things like this tend to be well camouflaged) we were good to go and able to give the 3D performance a proper run through.
We put the Vision Max glasses through their paces with Monster House, Resident Evil: Afterlife and Green Hornet (why, we couldn’t tell you) and followed up with a bout of the Crysis 2 campaign. We were pleasantly surprised with the results. Given the glasses’ universal remit we’d expected to see a slight sagging the performance area, but there was none apparent. They didn’t drop sync once, showed no propensity for crosstalk and, if we’re honest, felt a mild improvement over the set’s proprietary frames. Whether the latter was due to genuinely superior performance or just the pleasantly expanded field of view, though, it’s hard to say.
The extra wires and a sensor will likely irk those with a clutter phobia and if you don’t know an IR port from a SCART socket then be prepared for a certain degree of trial and error during setup. But all-in-all, you could do far worse than pick up a pair of Monster Vision glasses to supplement (or dare we say it replace) your current 3D frames.
