Sony Glasstron PLM-A35 - The 52" TV that fits in your pocket (almost)
Note: About 5 or 6 years ago, I reviewed a pair of Sony Glasstron PLM-A35 video glasses for another site. That review is no longer there, but we still get quite a few requests for information on the Glasstrons. After digging through the archives, here is my Glasstron PLM-A35 review.
Sony calls this a Personal LCD Monitor. I prefer to call them video glasses. Whatever you decide to call them, I can almost guarantee you'll have a love/hate relationship with them.
I wanted to like these tv-gogs, I really did. I have no room in my house for a real big-screen TV (nor the money to buy one), and watching widescreen movies on my 27" box just doesn't cut it. So I jumped at the chance to review this product, which I understand is quite difficult to get right now.
First, the specs:
- Two .55" LCDs (800x255 pixel resolution) reproduce the feel of watching a 52" TV from 6 1/2 feet away
- Video playback from any NTSC source, with composite and S-Video input
- Integrated inner-ear headphones with HiFi stereo sound and automatic volume limiter
- Adjustable volume and brightness controls
- Power supply: A/C adapter (included) or Sony InfoLithium battery (not included)
- Weight: 3.5 oz.
- MSRP: $499 US.
The package includes the glasses themselves, an A/C adapter, the connection box, and an A/V cable with RCA-style composite video/audio input jacks.
A quick look at the specs sounds promising. I had visions of myself lying in bed watching big-screen movies from a portable DVD player. "This is the way of the future", I thought. "The whole family in their respective darkened rooms, comatose in bed, brainwaves humming in a self-induced plugged-in LCD trance." Mmmm, as attractive as that sounds, we're not quite there yet.
The two main parts to the Glasstron are the connection box and the glasses themselves. The connection box has the composite A/V and S-Video inputs, A/C adapter jack, InfoLithium battery connection, and the brightness and volume controls. The InfoLithium battery than you can use with this is not included, probably to keep costs down. It's the same type of Lithium-Ion battery that Sony uses for their camcorders and some of their digital cameras, and is widely available. If you don't already have another device that can charge the battery, you'll also need to buy a charger, because the connection box does not have one built in.
The glasses themselves are coated in a stylish reflective blue plastic, reminiscent of wrap-around bike-racing sunglasses. They're about an inch thick, but because they're almost entirely made of plastic, they're not all that heavy. A separate LCD monitor is present for each eye. Unfortunately, there is no facility to drive different images to each eye, so there is no way to use these for 3D virtual reality applications. Unlike some of the other Glasstron models, there's no way to "see through" these glasses. You really can't use them while doing anything other than sitting still.
The "inner-ear" headphones clip into the inside front of the glasses for safekeeping. Each one is attached with about 4" of wire, so there's not much room for accidents if they get caught on something. When wearing the glasses, you simply insert a snugly-fitting earphone in each ear. The glasses also include a rubber nosepiece to hold them in place, and the folding arms are quite flexible for different-sized heads. There is no facility for adjusting the focus, so people who normally wear glasses may have a hard time with these.
In testing the Glasstrons, I tried out three different video sources.
The first test was done using a computer with composite video output. In 640x480 video mode, normal-sized text was quite difficult to read, and the picture in general was quite blurry. Plus, the fact that you can't really see the mouse or keyboard very well makes it quite difficult to actually use the computer while you're wearing the glasses. If you're using them to play games, then they're not too bad, as long as the on-screen details of the game are not that high, and you don't need to look at the keyboard. However, the relative picture size compared to a 17" monitor a foot and a half from your face is about the same.
Next, I plugged them into my camcorder, again using the composite video input. Playback from Hi8 tape was ok (I think the novelty factor at that point was more impressive than the picture quality), and playback from the direct camera input was quite good. In fact, once I got used to moving the camera without looking at it, I got to thinking that this would be an interesting way to shoot video - much better than peering through a tiny viewfinder or looking at the camcorder's own LCD display. You certainly wouldn't want to be walking around while wearing these, but if you're stationary, you may find them quite helpful for framing and shooting video, because you get a much better idea of what you're actually shooting on a bigger screen.
Finally, I tried them out with the best quality source available to me, an S-Video signal coming from a DVD player. The content for this test was the movie The Matrix.
Above all, what I really found to be excellent was the audio quality. My TV setup includes a Dolby Pro-Logic surround system with the full complement of front/rear/center speakers plus subwoofer, and I must say I actually preferred the surround-sound effectiveness of the earphones. I felt much more "inside" the movie than with my speaker setup. Of course, I sorely missed that subwoofer bass, but in general, the sound quality was excellent, even at maximum volume.
The picture quality was a bit harder to nail down. Theoretically, it should have felt like I was sitting 6 feet away from a 52" screen, but I haven't seen a 52" screen with such bad picture quality for years. In a darkened room, I did indeed feel the illusion of sitting in front of a much larger screen. In fact, I almost felt like I was in a movie theater, sitting about 20 feet away from a wall-sized screen. However, the picture quality was more like what I would expect if I was sitting right up close (less than 2 feet) to my 27" TV. There was a very definite pattern present, similar to what you see with your nose to a regular TV, and the picture wasn't nearly as sharp as I would expect from a large-screen TV. In addition, with a big screen you often need to look at different parts of the screen. In a theatre, you tend to move your head as well as your eyes in order to direct your gaze, but with the glasses, moving your head only results in the picture itself moving. You have to hold your head quite still, and just move your eyes. This, combined with a fixed focal distance that seemed more like six inches than six feet, caused my eyes to become quite strained after only half an hour of viewing.
What's more, around the same half-hour point, the glasses began to feel physically uncomfortable. The insides of my ears started hurting from the hard in-the-ear earphones, and the thickness of the arms started digging into the tops of my ears. I found myself fidgeting with the fit of the glasses more and more, and paying attention to the movie less and less. I also found that if I lay down on the couch, anything I rested my head on tended to push on the glasses enough to make them even more uncomfortable.
Like I said at the beginning of this review, I wanted to like the Glasstrons. They look funky, and the concept is good. However, I found them just too uncomfortable, and producing too much eye strain to really be able to use them for more than brief periods. Hopefully in the future I'll get a chance to take a look at Sony's higher-end model, which has a higher resolution LCD and direct RGB video input for use with a computer.
Pros
- Lightweight, small and portable
- Sound quality is fantastic
- Actually did feel like I was looking at a big screen
Cons
- No focal adjustments
- Produced eyestrain and ear discomfort fairly quickly
- Low resolution video quality
- Even though there is a separate LCD for each eye, there's no facility for 3D video
6/5/2006 : permalink
Only logged-in users can comment on this post. Login or Register now!
