iZ3D 22" Monitor
Want the most intense gaming in complete 3 dimensional viewing you can imagine, the iZ3D 22” Monitor gives you the feeling of actual 3 dimensional viewing with its dual monitor setup.
Ease of Use, Performance: 20/25, Look & Feel: 20/25,
Features 20/25, How much I enjoy 18/25
Total: 78/100
The iZ3D monitor is a great way to really get into the game but it does come at a hefty price tag of around $600 currently, this is down from the starting price of $999 less than a year ago. The monitor does work well and is easy to setup but there are a limited number of games with 3D available,the company is doing its best to add to this list though.
Currently there are almost a hundred games that are either supported and play just fine or users report that games work just fine with the iZ3D monitor. The monitor itself is actually an ingenious design with two physical monitors inside the slightly thicker monitor housing.
The first monitor or the one you see and is referred to as the front will be a see through monitor that gives your 3 dimensional view. The back monitor or the main monitor will be the one used for your regular monitor work and as the monitor that your eyes see as the base of your screen in games.
The iZ3D works simply by allowing your eyes to see two monitors at once at a slight angle using the special polarized glasses that also come with the monitor and offset the images you see. This means that some things in the screen will be on the front monitor like your character or things near you while other things will be on the back monitor.
Of course this is much simpler than the real technical explanation but it deals with polarizing the images and splitting and if you really want to know more you can go to the iZ3D website and read up on it in their whitepaper report. I understood it well enough to know it needs the two screens and the glasses to see the image in 3D and using the monitor also needs the software that splits the images into two separate signals.
The monitor does need two connections on your video card so any graphics cards that do not have the two outputs are not going to work with this as well as graphics cards running in Crossfire, CrossfireX or SLI. Currently they are working with both ATI and NVIDIA to solve the problems of using this monitor with more than one Graphics Processor Unit but I think that until they can output onto two screens for the graphics cards the monitor in 3D with multiple GPU’s will have to wait.
The iZ3D monitor comes with the monitor itself, a power cord, two DVI cables and one VGA cable as well as the three pairs of glasses and quick start sheet with a drivers CD. The three glasses are two pairs of regular glasses for people without prescription glasses and one pair of clip ons for anyone, like me, with glasses already.
The glasses are like polarizing sunglasses but not very shaded and only for use with the iZ3D monitor, you would not want to lose them or get them scratched up and have to buy new ones. You can get new ones from iZ3D though, at $10 apiece from their website. The monitor is available from their site as well as Newegg and Amazon internet stores at about $600.
Installing the monitor with the system is pretty easy but you will have to attach the stand to the monitor, which really should be done after you attach the cords. The one cord is right in the middle of the monitor’s bottom and is a bit difficult to reach once the stand is assembled. You can tilt the stand to the extreme back so it is more accessible but it just makes things easier to attach them before putting the stands base on.
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