Demonstrating 3D At Retail Is ‘Juggling Act,’ Sony Says
Sony Electronics continues to “search for the best way to demonstrate 3D in the retail environment,” spokesman Ray Hartjen said Tuesday. It’s important to do so “in a way that resonates with consumers, but also in a way that doesn’t confuse other key messaging points that consumers are looking for, mainly superior picture quality and connectivity,” he said. He called it “a juggling act, for certain."
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
"Broken displays certainly don’t help,” Hartjen said, referring to the many non-working active-shutter 3D glasses from Sony and other manufacturers that we discovered at various retail stores when recently shopping for a 3D TV (CED July 24 p3). Hartjen said he advised Sony’s sales and retail activation colleagues about “the challenges” that we faced when trying to find a working demonstration of a 3D TV.
Hartjen declined to say if Sony was weighing support for passive 3D and possibly dropping active-shutter 3D support. It’s much easier to demonstrate passive 3D TVs at retail stores. There is also little concern about broken glasses with passive 3D TVs because the glasses they use are so cheap and don’t have electronic components that can malfunction. Passive 3D glasses also don’t need to be recharged or turned on and off like active-shutter glasses. But Hartjen said he “can’t offer comment on Sony’s strategies around either active shutter or passive 3D glasses."
Sony “remains vigilant” in its efforts to “provide an exceptional consumer experience at all touchpoints, and that very much includes retail environments, both at the Sony Store and at other retailers,” Hartjen said. That applies to not only the space “on the floor” at retail stores, but also to “providing retail sales associates with the necessary training to properly discuss and demonstrate the myriad of complex features in many HDTVs,” he said.
The lack of 3D TV display options extended to the Sony store that we visited in the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, N.Y., although we encountered no defective active-shutter glasses there. Only one TV -- the Sony XBR-55HX929 active-shutter 3D TV, at about $3,000 -- was demonstrated in 3D at the store. That is a “relevant” example of the issues that we experienced in general, Hartjen said. But he said although “there might have been only one TV set up to statically display 3D,” if we were “interested in checking out the 3D feature on a different model, it would be as simple as turning the channel on the TV feed or changing out the source BD content."
Salespeople at Sony’s stores are “pleased to assist consumers in those requests, and it’s super easy to do,” he said, saying “you could take the 3D glasses from the first display” and “use them on the other TVs” there. We told Hartjen that we asked the sales associate there if we could see 3D demonstrated on any other TVs there and were told that was the only model set up for it. The sales associate didn’t offer to demonstrate it on another model, but we didn’t push the issue because we didn’t see the model there that we were looking for.
Panasonic and Samsung didn’t immediately comment on the broken active-shutter 3D glasses. We also asked LG to comment on why so few of their 3D TVs were set up at retail stores to demonstrate 3D despite the fact that the passive 3D that its TVs use make their TVs much easier to demonstrate. It didn’t immediately comment. At most of the stores we visited, only one model from each of the select manufacturers offered there was demonstrated in 3D, including LG’s TVs.